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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781556596100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Copper Canyon Press |
| Publication date: | 02/02/2021 |
| Pages: | 64 |
| Sales rank: | 235,364 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.80(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Pity the Doctor, Not the Disease
Science in its tedium reveals that every spirit
we spirit ganks a solid half hour from
our life spans. So says my doctor, a watery,
Jesus-eyed man, and hard to suffer
with his well-intended scrips for yoga
and neti pots, notably stingy with the better
drugs, in situ here amid the disinfected
toys, dreadful in their plastic baskets.
Above his head, the flayed men of medical
illustration are nailed for something like
décor. The eyeball scheme is best,
with its wondrous canal of Schlemm,
first favorite of all weirdly named
eponymous body parts. It’s just a splotch
of violet on the diagram, but without it
our aqueous humors would burst
their meshy dams and overflow. Dust
thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken
of the soul... is what I quote him
as he thumps my back with his tiny
doctor’s tomahawk. But he’s used to me.
We have an understanding. What he
means to miser, I’ve come to spend
most lavishly. And I feel fortunate again
to be historically shaky in the maths,
enough to avoid making an easy sum
of my truly happy hours, or nights curled
sulfurous on my side, a priced-to-sell
shrimp boiling in anxious sleep.
If we’re lucky, it’s always a terrible time
to die. Better the privilege of booze
than the whim of one more shambolic
butcher shelling peasants in a wood,
our world’s long spree of Caesars
starting wars to pay their bills
in any given era’s Rome. Turns out,
Longfellow’s stomach did for him,
and he died thirsty, calling for more opium.
Free of the exam room now, I spot the same
busted goldfish in his smeary bowl
beside the door where he’s glugged along
for years, a mostly failed distraction
for poxed or broken children. I raise my fin
to him, celebrate the poison we’re all
swimming in, remembering the way
you say cheers in Hungarian:
Isten, Isten, meaning,
in translation, “I’m a god. You’re a god.”
Sundays
after church, she shucked the grip of shoes, peace beings
of neighbors, the puce-faced elders and pilly felt hangings,
and that soft, sad man with his sorrows,
no business of hers.
Looking up where he drooped, Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,
she thought, choosing one adult fib that seemed, for once, more
possible than not; she felt him contagious, a man with his torso
gouged like that, of no-thank-you troubles and terrible holes.
She was sorry for him, though decided their story likely a lie,
unlikely stories abounding, aplenty, for little girls to buy.
But she wanted no truck nonetheless, nuh uh—and what had she
done?—how bad could she be?—and whose son was this,
this sad, soft man another would hurt like that?
So Sundays, she shucked and ran and climbed,
the birch in her yard no scourge. Who’d put, she thought, a gift
worth having at the end of a whip? Such adult nonsense;
if she needed beseeching, here were the leaves now candling
their verdigris, in spring, where a girl could be redeemed,
only as sorry as she considered necessary, sewing herself into
what anyone who really looked could see was something true.
Reckless, she went, farther, higher, climbing clean into the birch’s
crown, its limbs growing greener and thinner, the girl now certain
it was only a father who’d do that to a kid and call it a lesson.
How lovely that spirit,
this girl at the top, knowing no one could reach her.
Table of Contents
Instructions for the Hostage 3
Loser Bait 4
Pity the Doctor, Not the Disease 7
In Airports 10
Your Failure 12
When I Am a Teenage Boy 14
Hypotenuse 16
The Man Who Fills In Space 19
Dum Spiro Spero 22
Sundays 24
Please Forgive Me All That I Have Ruined- 26
In Which a Therapist Asks for the Gargoyle Who Sits on My Chest 30
As for the Heart 34
She Returns to the Water 37
A Few Notes on the Poems 45
About the Author 47