jonberger

If you’re heading North on the Six train at One Two Five
look for the shiny bald head and pull him off his phone
offer him a peanut butter cup.

If he says “No,” ask him what he did with my body.

She laid the claim long ago
and no one said a word.
They simply let her twist in the wind,
her wounds unprotected
festering, dripping away.
Rose had been bleeding ever since.

When others spoke,
they began to believe,
and her words began to ring true.
We harkened back, and listened
and someone got someone thought to throw some cloth Rose’s way.
Her wounds have healed a little in that time,
the blood collecting slightly,
scabbing over a bit.

Still, she feels pain when the subject comes around,
when her time in the desert is discussed.
She prefers to focus on the resolution
than her isolation.
Rose doesn’t like to think of all the pricks made against her.
She chooses to move on.

When I collapsed
– I didn’t faint. Men don’t faint –
they said it was dehydration,
pure and simple,
and that I should be drinking about four liters a day.
“I promise,” I swore,
and promptly broke the promise.

Now, I handle between two and three liters a day,
and still piss ridiculously,
so I don’t know what the doctors were telling me about.
If this amount of intake
causes that amount of urine,
I must be doing something right.

I drink from recycled bottles – I don’t buy water in the city.
That’s a ridiculous idea.
We get great water from upstate, here.
I can’t in good conscience pay for clear liquids in New York,
not unless it’s an emergency.

I am currently very thirsty.
I am currently in a quandary.
I do not know what to do.

I’ll bet if I had water in me, I’d know what to do…

You have reached the end of the universe.
It has been a long trip
and, strange,
you feel like there are breadcrumbs to take you back
because you see breadcrumbs behind you.
There is a trail of garbage from whence you came.

Behind you, atop you, in front… in all directions,
there is stuff.
Detritus that has been consumed and discharged
in a shrinking universe.
Everything is smaller now
and there is no room for what is left.

Space is compacted around us.
The universe cannot bear anymore.
It hasn’t been able to
for a very long while.
You’ve been searching,
hunting for an out
but nowhere has been a home for you
or anyone else.
Nothing is left.

This is the end for the universe
for you
and everything else
as you are
squeezed
tight.

I had a dream.
She was shimmering,
this vision of a creature
that had just rejected me worse
than any woman I could remember
ever hurting me.

I mean, I loved her.
We’d been dating for a couple of months,
longer than anyone else had ever been with me
but she’d torn me new ones repeatedly
with her indecision and cruel choices
but all that was done.
She’d put indecision aside
and selected against me.
It was done.

In the dream she just lay there,
in the air
on a bed.
An air bed (heh)
in blue.
She was gorgeous
and I could only look up to her
wondering why this vision
would not leave me be
even though she had left me.

She just couldn’t escape my thoughts
no matter how I tried.

She didn’t cry in the dream.
She was emotionless.
She didn’t seem to notice I was there.
She simply stared ahead
above it all
literally.

It was a simple image
and it stayed with me
and that’s why I wrote what I wrote.
I thought it was self-explanatory
but maybe it wasn’t.

Frankie said, “Time goes slower when the clock stops.”
I had overdosed on Oreos an hour before
so I wasn’t at my best.
It took me five minutes to say, “What was that?”
“Time goes slower when the clock stops.”
“I thought that was it,” I said. “What does that mean?”
Frank didn’t respond for a while. “Damned if I know.”

We returned to the silence. I could use another cookie.
“Where do you go when the speakers turn off?” I said.
He turned to me. “I just go to the land of make-bereaved.
Where I remember the nearly-departed.”
“That’s… heart-breaking,” I said, “You lose anyone recently?”
“My uncle,” he replied, looking out the window.
“I got twenty thousand from him.”
“You been drinking with that?”
“I been drinking with that.”
“All right,” I said.

He handed me a cookie.
It was good.
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” I offered.
“Barely knew him,” said he.
“Oh.”

If you submit to Poetry
please only send unpublished work.
If it has already been on social media
Poetry does not want it.
Sorry, them’s the rules.

If you submit to Poetry
you can expect an eight-month response period.
Poetry receives one hundred and fifty thousand pieces each year.
Poetry can only take a few.
Your patience
is appreciated.

If you submit to Poetry
do not do it during the Summer
for that is when Poetry closes down.

If you submit to Poetry
you will be paid
but less for printed poems than for multimedia.
Again, them’s the rules.

Submit to Poetry.
Now.

Scientists refuse to state it categorically
but there are sleeping octopuses
with active brains
that change colors
who seem to be going through REM sleep.

They think these intelligent creatures are dreaming,
going through drills
or remembering adventurous aspects of their day.

The many-armed are refreshing themselves
in sleep
like their above-ground little-armed colleagues.
They do not look up to us in this way.
They look fore.

You are changing.
Of course you are changing, stupid child.
That you ask the question suggests you may not be changing enough,
that your head is in the same shape it was the last time you asked
such a similar question.

The world around you is always changing, too,
its shape morphing at the will of the money.
In this way, it is always the same.
The people define the size, the shape of the place.
That is the way of things
same as it ever was.

You needn’t ask this question.
It is the way of things.
Know it in your bones.
Learn.

But be sure to come
when you have something new to ask.
I long to show you something else
so you can truly grow.

Manhattan’s looking hazy.
It’s right there in the distance
far enough, out of reach,
but close enough to taste.

You can still tell it’s New York,
but somethings different.
Something’s missing.
Nothing to put a finger on
– it’s still out of reach, after all.
There’s not anything specific but…
But.

What is wrong with New York?
Can it be fixed?
Or is this what it’s always been
and in that has changed?