TWO POEMS | ALEC HERSHMAN
Yahrzeit
When I write your name
in the snow on my wrist, like this,
I am a big fan of a kite.
The handcuffs are a bright formality.
The afternoon sun has assembled
its shawl of gauze.
I hear from a dozen eggs the derivative
clicking of brothers, born to compete.
I see smoke stretch over the mountains,
like a feather losing its crest.
Sometimes hands shake
with tenderness. A tree
and a foal, both striped wet,
and brown-muscled feel the field-wind
brushing them. Shame chased in a bottle
holds its eye for beer, then pours
its cyclops heart out. These pages
of my flesh hang on with letters
lit by a blade. Memory eventually
becomes conventional, like spelling.
Timedog
3:31
Look at the page. Make a timestamp.
The rind on the orange is peeling.
This is a funny story revealing
its precedent. The number of times glad
exceeded vertigo to get out of the house
was a worried balloon that it turned out
fulfilled itself, robust. My whole life
a limmerick meant I was scant, afraid.
Meant-to-braid as lips oppose uncertainty.
Oh yeah, make a timestamp.
3:32
Clues evolve in the dream
to people-out-of-oysters. Oyster people.
Good fucks.
You can almost see the mind pass
like an egg
where instead is a solar eclipse.
The freeway’s rich with images
of demise. How do you
like them apples?
If this is the great unraveling,
the khoi in the pond remain
unfortunately unhidden.
3:35
Cloud, soft, commercial.
This is just the way that dandelions stretch.
An adventure reproducing sick
on a healthy health to path.
8-ball says check back.
Tap, tap, tap.
Is this thing on?
3:38
I remember, the group and I used to do this little thing
called checking in, the shell
from which the chicken also came.
Wise horses are called camels.
For how I gallop
or collapse, is mine and nobody else’s
business.
I am pouring a sandsculpture with God
and some famished eyelashes.
Lovely in envy
like ether pangs.
Time is my project.
~
Suddenly smug, shy Connie
gets Miss-Muffeted. And I have
to burp. And our favorite old clown
is eating his cake, taking life
by the bullhorn or two.
Popcorn will forever be
a chicken shriek on which being
here’s a feather of a doubt—
My seeder-sodder
rest laurelly, arrested
by the roses on the bear’s throat
to get the heart to go again.
3:46
Nice try, 48
snuck down somewhere
more solar.
Simple was at best.
Toy piano.
The sweet ameliorations
of daylight poured on maps.
Of course, when the suitor comes,
the suitor is death,
and I never notice it:
until my kidneys grow large and fond—
until I think a liter of Dalmatians,
and have just about enough of a good idea.
~
I dress in black. I am one of the stagehands
who move the curtains, windows, walls—
am on another set, plane
where torrents of who-the-knows-what
did-a-rain.
Fat attic. And the stuffing having
pinked is stuffed.
My one good clitoris
winks. Enough’s enough
And daylight brings
a pig in pencil pink.
3:56
A real burp
is prefigured by a series of false alarms.
What did you
just call a ghost
? [missing] [red- ]
collard greens
were a series of miscommunica—
sin the transcript.
As two things go together, a sunset
catches up
is what we mean by love.
Mean by love. It says it all.
3:58
Can you hear me in the back?
But instead of a microphone, she taps
the moving walkway in the airport,
stripe down the purple terminal
like an iris throat.
Gives yellow pause.
Wait, wait, wait. Stop the tape.
4:00
Welcome to the size of thoughts
you didn’t know existed.
Welcome to your year on Earth.
Logically, only the first.
I feel a cool breeze come on
and a vanity man splooge meringue
to sink a float of shaving cream. The sky is full
of muzzy bearded beards.
I know I implied a fractal was a lie,
but here’s another buzzing snail,
so sue me.
Didn’t I mean a shaving commercial?
Wasn’t I even a little bit scared?
No, dear reader. A pimento the size of
a fake fingernail to the olive I was, stuffed in.
It’s this little thing I learned to do, am learning.
Thank God for Ferris Wheels.
Or don’t. They run me rag
and me voices in me head,
a perturberance in thought,
a mystical mosquito, a mistake
in the small-to-medium scale economy
for swapping DNA.
Snapping on a glove, both doctors
and the third degree
specialize in fixing beams.
Grammar grains
of paradise
will one day grow to birds
themselves, and then our stems, denuded,
follow black back down to dirt.
4:12
The way Sally Jesse interviews
the woman who trains the dolphins
is like she’s right up from the tank,
her wet, wed semblance, orca black.
I know Michelle.
I know.
So ladies with 80’s-night haircuts
waved to themselves in the mirror.
Aliens are where we’re going,
come around. The staircase
is a splendid piano too.
And finding out, I thought, well fuck
me below the brows. A hero’s wings
are wet.
Go to bed, Jack; the dinner plates are clinking.
Who is Jack?
Oh, mom’s dad. Dead.
So a verve is born
of pre-emptory ashes.
In my lifetime, no one was shocked.
A red curtain grew emboldened
as, face-by-face, the cast washed off.
Alec Hershman is the queer author of Permanent and Wonderful Storage, winner of the Robin Becker Prize (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019) and The Egg Goes Under (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017). He has received awards from the KHN Center for the Arts, The Jentel Foundation, Playa, The Virginia Creative Center for the Arts, and The Institute for Sustainable Living, Art, and Natural Design. He lives in Michigan where he teaches writing and literature to college students. You can learn more at alechershmanpoetry.com.
Cover art by Shane Allison.
