FIVE POEMS by ADRIAN SOBOL
High Impact Donkey
You purchase a high impact donkey. You’ve never felt safer. You go downhill faster than your race car driving father ever dreamed. The laws of thermodynamics bend to your high impact donkey. At such high speeds, you witness the interstitial music woven between all living things. But you take a turn too fast. You survive. The high impact donkey does, too. You crash through a bakery window and end up covered in yeast, in flour, a trail of broken eggs behind you. The local children laugh. They tease you. They begin to call you Doughboy Dan in their little playground songs, even though your Christian name, the one your father died giving you, is Hot Dog Hank.
once the dread boiled over, it got into everything
our daydreams left us
a forestry of graves
we were hands
knees
scrubbing the kitchen
crevicing the toothbrush
between tiles
What a mess, I said, my arm
stuck to the counter
I’ll have to amputate
pink, frothy, the dread ran down
the refrigerator door
it took beautifully
to cursive
leaving us messages
on the kitchen floor
melting ads, letters & old wedding
announcements to pulp
Happy New Year
Buy One Get One
All Expenses Paid
all these things we could not imagine
not even at the height of orgasms
which were (according to your day planner)
scheduled less frequently
pushed aside for regular intervals
of our deep orthopedic grief
it's been months since
I've longed this hard
to take out the trash
so what else can we do but strive
to panic comfortably?
the super hasn’t responded
to our notices
he hasn’t fixed
the leaking faucet
he hasn’t fixed
the rundown bestiary
I suspect he must have gone
ghost or has been one
since the beginning of time—
I like to imagine him this way
his tool belt askew
& full of tulips
two eyeholes in a bedsheet wading out
from our ocean’s primordial salmagundi
leading those first vertebrates
(Georgiana, Li’l Kilmer, Sally, the rest...)
on a search for beauty
through a world
designed
to kill us
in so many intricate
& delightful ways
the flat earth society
I.we have theorized new solutions
for dancing
on television
we talk
about the roundness
of food
we are against it
we talk about the longing
of the american oil heiress
we are against it, too
II.a house becomes another metaphor
for what we put in it
furniture, mourning, the half-life
of beauty
the brain memorizes faces, names,
the geometry of columns
in doing this we invent
our own gravity—
the trash we accumulate
is a kind of romance
III.after the commercial break:
poets keep writing, the news
anchor reports,
even though
the market
has asked them
politely
to stop
sunflower seeds
for Molly BrodakI’m living on my own
hunger
built from
the last of my flesh
this is mine
I said
snatching
bread
from
my guests
drinking wine
from their glass
come hold me
awake
away from
all the myths
I’ve made
for myself
like a magpie
tied to the stalk
of a sunflower
turning in fits
to chase
the sun
summer dims to a close
the latest attractions have come
& gone: the great crocheted lake,
the bear that can sign
its name in beautiful cursive, the almost
visible woman
spectacle reigns & fades
our surprise
works its way through us
with a shot
(the gasp was
invented back in Toledo in 1902
as a way to empty the body
for something new
a safer alternative
than the earlier pistol
method)
there’s nothing so hot
as that we said looking
at a few photographs
of our haircuts &
tshirts
proof
we were once this
alive & this beautiful
& bracing
for this world to grow
more interesting (an event, I should mention, that has not come)
I have since built myself a flying machine
& will of course crash it
through my splendor
baby I’m sorry
I was bored
& no one was around to see
Adrian Sobol (he/him) is a Polish immigrant / musician / poet. He is the author of “The Life of the Party is Harder to Find Until You're the Last One Around” (Malarkey Books) and “this is not where we parked. this is ohio.” (Ghost City Press). He lives in Chicago. Twitter: @yo_adrianididit; IG: @yoadrianididit.