The rain tonight dribbled through the silver maple leaves long after it had rained. I sang a few bars of Guy Clark’s “Dublin Blues,” thinking of the spider I hit with a boot this afternoon for nothing but fear and all the pests I am always killing to assuage its grip. Spiders of this sort (brown recluse?) hunt roaches and other insects we do not want around. I worry over what potting soil and damp cardboard will bring to the garage. I am the type to stay up all night with vague foretellings of reckonings as I imagine the collapsed carcass distending its legs once again and scurrying away in a gesture of weary forgiveness though there is nothing a spider or a person has the agency
to forgive.
. . .
Fight Song of the Broken Shovel
In a world of white, my spine
is too sick to register the snow.
The hard ground still
administers its ache.
The snow fleas work interminably unseen, saying, “Death is one function;
do not call it ‘rest.’”
I do not call it.
Nobody mentions it up here.
In a world of shovels,
I am the gripless one
amidst their throaty machines boisterous as drunks,
too tired to wish anybody well.
Hoarse with scraping, and the injury gets worse
on days like this;
I am past the point
of healing with rest.
As creatures go, we
are unregenerate.
. . .
Epistle to a Malt-Worm
Dear rasp around the edges of the voice, dear atonal rendition of a Gordon Lightfoot song, dear weevil in the dry husk of my ear cursing the governor, masticating his kangaroo congress, those plutocratic sycophants, for robbing working people of their rights. Dear red-eyed dipsomaniac, the stench of cheap whiskey doesn’t make you wrong. Dear dead before 60, dear fatal resignation, dear nothing’s dear or true beyond the rigid shape of history and death, dear plethora of classist nouns for you, nobody cares that the Edmund Fitzgerald was on its way to Great Lakes Steel on Zug Island when it sank, though you say it like a source of pride, you say it like a doomed and storied ship. Because you work amid refineries and coke in a neighborhood where people scrub their awnings with toilet bowl cleanser to remove the untold sludge and falcons perch on giant gantry cranes to hunt, because your greens are splotched with chemicals, all anybody hears is the slurred braying of a dying animal
as the befuddled bartender throws you out.
. . .
Fight Song of the Lazar House
Nancy has to chain the dog to the banister so it doesn’t attack me, some beagle mix, purblind, fat. She offers me a cup of coffee as she lights a cigarette in my grandmother’s kitchen and coughs like a garbage disposal with a loose blade. She wears a shrunken pink shirt, faded pink with a yellow nicotine limn, sweat shorts and flip flops; she has tallow skin, a goiter like a waddle on her neck. I found her an hour ago at the strip mall methodically searching the potted plants and sidewalk cracks for butts. I took her to the Shell Station and bought two packs of Kools, figuring this would keep her home for the remainder of the day. This looks like my grandmother’s kitchen, and it is my grandmother’s kitchen, but the doors have been torn off the cabinets and rows of orange medicine bottles sit where my grandmother’s teacups used to be. When I ask Nancy where my uncle has gone, she says she doesn’t care and hopes he never gets back, that he backhands her and calls her a whore. I sip the bitter instant coffee and read the labels on the bottles: Lithium, Haliperodol, Zoloft, Oxycontin; not all of these scripts are hers. She points to a picture on the corkboard above the telephone and says it’s me. No, that’s Uncle John, I correct her. No, that’s you, she insists. I nod as I sit at the table to wait. My grandmother would sit in this chair and chain-smoke Doral cigarettes while playing an interminable game of solitaire. The old man stayed in his plush chair in the den and half-heartedly read novels while watching golf or baseball. They are both gone now, and I don’t know how my aunt and my uncle divide up the rooms in this house. I imagine there are rooms for dust-caked books and rooms for loose pennies, rooms for pills that were never taken and rooms for empty hangers, rooms for errant memories, for rumpled gowns and collared shirts, paternal rooms, maternal rooms, carpeted rooms for moieties in flux, rooms of throw pillows for a dog to tear apart, rooms for too many pills ingested, for hepatotoxic bleeding out the eyes. Nancy rolls blue smoke over her filmy tongue; the idea to light tobacco and inhale it came from a dark, contemplative place, I think. I give her a hug before I leave. Her dog growls at the end of its chain as I open
the door.
. . .
How to Comply with a Therapeutic Dose
A woman without a shadow
is not necessarily her own shadow.
The dog that shadows me is not technically a shadow,
though my father has given it this name.
In Lineland shadow
does not exist.
I’ve shaded paper with pencil lead
and seen the macules turn to shadow.
I am a word on my shadow’s lips
spoken to torture a heavy-lidded beast.
In Flatland shadow
does not exist.
I do not recognize my position before the sun. I displace
no light when I stand. The Clozapine
draws a two-dimensional me in this quadrant
where dogs bark and gates and rat traps clang.
In five o’clock shadow
the story of my father’s face.
The idea of above persists, even as I grind these pills
with my cigarette butts
into the soil of an umbrella plant and dream up other uses
for his belts.
. . .
© Cal Freeman
Cal has writing published in many journals including Berfrois, The Paris-American, RHINO, Drunken Boat, The Cortland Review, and Birmingham Poetry Review. He is the recipient of the Howard P. Walsh Award for Literature, The Ariel Poetry Prize, and The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes). Cal has also been nominated for Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. His book of poems, Brother of Leaving, has just been published by Antonin Artaud Publications.
