And So On in a Week (Zuihitsu) - Koss
Email request for a reading—then two days later, Devin, the medium, 56, [who predicted Max’s death, and said she would come back and kill her ex] died in his sleep. I saw him a month before in his red-walled, makeshift shop, agitated, distracted, with darkness all around him. Your grandfather is around, he said, and then I smelled Grampa’s Copenhagen—he is proud of you / something he never said. “And Max’s ex is Satan is Satan is Saturn,” he said, shuffling his cards. I see his scythe coming ‘round (it had already landed in a poem, in fact). She’s coming back to take him out.” He drew another card and wiped his cheek. I was disturbed for another week. Last words Max said to him when he took her kids, “I will kill you.”
Three poems, no, groups of digi-text, all lost in the void of Submittable / rejection embracing filter malfunction. Normally I don’t care…
Rewarded for being a whinging ass by Jean / her own difficult story unravelling / stranger things and welcome / her grandfather’s ghost showed up in her grapefruit just in time for his birthday / her husband came home from the hospital for the final time.
An online hobby friend, Ron, I never met in person, asked me to choose one of his deceased mother’s keepsakes from a Facebook gallery / she died in 2002 / I picked a tiny ceramic boat shown next to a quarter for scale / with a large yellow glue stain and enormous black stitches on the sail.
His father made fun of him for being fat / I will love her for him or just for her but not tell him / I know how to love secretly / Lesbians are like that.
I once wrote him a birthday message on Facebook / he barked back there was nothing to celebrate.
My phone blinked an alert with a message from my California friend, which I played / somehowfrom a year ago / butt bumped into the future-past / I called her / she had left no message / her father turned 95 Thursday in his newly-delivered hospital bed / her mother, a hoarder, recently released from her skin / They are still unearthing the trailer / She is a writer / We were both laid off for being over-40 old
Jean found her brother—plus three others / My lost sisters and mother are sprinkled throughout someone’s south like an unnamed constellation / My mother is a lost-and-found mother on a two-year cycle that grows wider as time progresses.
My schizophrenic grandfather died in a halfway house in New Orleans / he was 51 / nobody knew him or how he arrived from Michigan. He owned a pilled maroon blanket, two striped button-up shirts, a pair of dungarees, a stained t-shirt, some pencils, three large four-foot stacks of newspapers, a ragged brown wallet, and a half-used pack of cigarettes.
Like his daughter, schizophrenics tend to wander once the asylums opened their doors…then closed them.
My mother drove to his body then / one of the times she left us in Florida with the mean French babysitter, her gigantic charcoal poodle, and the closet where I hid from tomatoes I later found out were tornadoes.
I inherited his head, cheek bones, and weirdly-set ears, but not the cleft palette or brain / otherwise I’d be an amazing poet and play the drums and smoke/ I have an amber photo of him as a child, screaming down the slide.
Near Tampa, where we stayed at the orphanage, truckle beds jammed like a train wreck throughout the west-side bunker / green shadowed and dim / light scattered through the honeycomb windows / we were spotted and not spotted with measles or pox.
Max’s mother used to take in orphans in South Africa on holidays / and Max, small and horrified, gave them gifts as they shared food on cobbled-together, sheet-covered tables. Later, at 17, Max joined a mission run by nuns / She spent a year in near silence, scrubbing the floors on her knees, handwashing the linens, never bedding even one.
Outside the sun torched the orange trees and scorched the Centipede grass / leaving endless sand and a sprawling thicket / clawing through the rusty chain fence / I hunched in a swing / small ass hugged by the black rubber strap / and noted my sister, given to happiness then, pushing the merry-go-round with a smaller, dirt-kneed girl / she made friends so easily with the other pocked dirty kids.
I, on the other hand, sat alone / watched the sun seem to orbit the earth, unable to measure the past or future / making up songs in my head about my grandmother. After her accident in 2001, I cared for her, easing into the switches of time / we sometimes communicated in songs we made up on the fly.
My grandmother later dismissed the time spent in that Florida shelter —“it wasn’t long…” At four, I knew that time is not a linear thing, but something that circles around and around like deranged planets with their secret charts, weaving between us / into our future and someone’s / those acrid ancestral daguerreotypes before the smile zeitgeist for all white America captured all our pale sepia faces, and we faded back into color like queer rainbows with our orange-peel mouths blossoming open for decades and decades.
I wrote 30 poems for Facebook, then 40, then 80 / ‘til I was empty / where the titles were the poem. I understand the importance of titles, of economy and attention spans, and time constraints, and busy schedules. They rolled up the feeds randomly like dreamy dead digital sea scrolls, into someone’s yesterday, next week / tomorrow / then vanished / archived for good.
One was a leg shooting in our yard by someone playing redneck quick draw / another my long- lost bisexual stepmother’s long ski-slope nose / I once angered her as a child with a cartoon. I edited her anger out of the title. Her nose might suddenly appear anywhere, on a salad plate, or on any surprised face at some time in the future or past / noses are like that / I got my grandfather’s.
Originally published by Entropy 2019
Koss is an artist and writer with over 200 publications in journals and anthologies including Moonpark Review, diode poetry, Petrichor, BSF, Get Bent, Beyond the Frame, Sage Cigarettes, Beaver Mag, and many others. Find links to their work at https://koss-works.com
