by Jakub Švanda
New Year’s Day, 2020
1.
There are too many things on my plate,
so much to eat, unraveled dreams:
the man with the long brown fingers,
sadness smeared all over his face like
peanut butter, the way he stood
beside my car with two photographs,
slipping them through the space at the top
of my window. Caramel nougat
wrapped around bones and microscopic hairs,
the pictures of himself slumped over a sparsely
appointed kitchen table, head bowed like a monk.
He poured himself into the front seat and said,
“Let’s go.”
2.
Pain in my right hip reminds me that I am
not a perfect flower, unable to bloom without
appointment. My growing season has shortened.
Always something amiss — swells of fog, too hot,
too cold, too wet, too bold for missing petals
in the most logical placement, fucked-up
Fibonacci, bad Feng shui. Accept it and pull it down
into the soil. That’s where anything that matters
ends up.
3.
My mother’s breath hovers over my plate like a
sweet gas. “Eat your black-eyed peas for good luck,”
she says. There are dreams that she lived so well,
double-Dutching with the finesse of a ballerina,
the determination of a pit bull, the constitution
of an angel. I billboard her DNA, bioengineer a
proteinous package to graft onto my own tree.
The apostles are alive and doing well, infecting me
with this unfashionable zest for expecting good
things to come out of my garden.
Whether John Dorroh taught any science is still being discussed. However, he managed to show up every morning for a couple of decades with at least three lesson plans and a thermos of robust Colombian. His poetry has appeared in about 60-70 journals, including Dime Show Review, Red Fez, North Dakota Quarterly, Selcouth Station, and Os Pressan (forthcoming). He also writes short fiction and the occasional rant.
Jakub Švanda: Queer writer, poet, and visual artist, MA student in Brno, Czech Republic. My art is a compulsion, an itch scratched with satisfaction.