by Alexander Duringer
Notes on Doom
We started work in the factory where sweat
crept through boxers to asshole, fetid
& slick as the slit throat of a bull sacrificed
to a god gone estranged. Together we walked
to the car through a group of men who’d sniffed
my voice, watched my hands swish buckets
or fold the new-printed shirts too well. A man followed me
to the bathroom stall. Another to the supply closet
where I was layered with new stinks & counted
pairs of wire cutters, safety gloves, brooms
& rags used to wipe away our stains. They offered me
Don Collins cigarettes on breaks as I read
Homer & wrote applications. I wanted these men
to see how I would leave them there with you.
You left me there with her shaking
hum to bum a smoke outside the
hospital, shooting the shit, you
said, between cries when it was over.
You are always making friends, but couldn’t
stand to watch our mother’s living
corpse collapse into machines or see
the urostomy pouch beside the bed. I listened
to breaths of air through the tube
in her throat & the sound the tongue
made when it was removed. Paid attention
to the doctor’s speech of synapses & stems
after the septic home of her voice shuttered
& now if I dream, I dream of her asleep.
When I dream I dream of my mother asleep
during the ‘77 blizzard, car stalled under buckets
of snow thrown down by god. Her boss told her
to come in & so she went–Methodist politeness,
suburban ambition. My father’s aunt Kay called
her ‘left-hander’ & ‘that Debbie’–an adjective
sharp enough to slice through time into the 90s
when we all drove to the salon where Kay’s cotton-
swab head was permed. There’s a story once told
at parties of faucets & steaming water; a child too long
unbaptized held above the heat in Kay’s bone-
corset fist. My mother stomped upstairs three
at a time, the knife she’d used to slice my yellow cake
in hand. No one is left to tell me what was said.
No one is left to tell me what was said before god
ties me up with the guts of a lesser god. Look, look
god says, but I turn my face to the raven’s shriek
beyond the glare & hills of violet heather
where the gathering dead spill up, up in this grove
of unscabbed wounds. My mother, eyeless,
& father, with cataracts, call out a song, its lyrics, our
names. god slaps the bird from the wind, rips
feathers from its wings till he chooses one to glide
along my nipples. He ties the intestines tighter
round my chest & penis. O, batter
my heart!, he says, Pledge me your burning,
& threads a needle’s silver hole, defiant of the end’s
beginning–when the word ‘rot’ matters less than ‘freeze’.
The word ‘rot’ mattered less than ‘freeze’
as pipes split & light failed in the Salvation
Army Rehabilitation Center where dependents
were abandoned, left to eat stolen beans until
all that remained was pearlescence, undead
as my brother’s new incisors. The multi-banded
storm grew from the warm lake & slid over
that Christmas as the men pressed themselves
together beneath cheap blankets. Their cocks
might have touched through sweatpants as breath
rose & joined, hung like damp shirts below
the tearaway ceiling. Did they gift their bodies
while snow gathered & gathered? If my brother
smiled, did another man whisper, How nice you look.
How nice we looked as boys combing shallows
of the Atlantic for lucent smacks of jellyfish
with limpets used as scalpels to spill lightning
into the sand, then as shovels for mass
graves of mesoglea beneath the Jersey sun.
They did not feel pain–all the cutting
was for nothing. Born within a shriek
of blizzards, you envied my birthday’s raw
burning & drank the sun until your skin grew a meaner pink
than the clinging jellies’ inside crosses. I’ve earned this pain,
you said when our mother died. You’d lined a group
of dealers up at a Sunoco & filled their tanks
using her Mastercard. You’re gone again. What light
will your autopsy chart–in your halves & quarters?
His autopsy charts halves & quarters, neatens
the body into dividends, but my father’s death is loud
the way the broom is loud when it falls to the floor.
His apartment is hollow, full of my mother’s tall, broken
clock & scattered pieces from Good Will: a love seat, a
coffee table. They must go. I’ve placed my parents’ ashes
together beside the front door like worn shoes, severed feet,
like abandoned newborns. The clock chimes only
with the closing door. I move through its frame
to carry bags to my father’s Toyota or the trash.
The love seat is heavy. I push it & find a large black stain
whose center I kneel within when you call & want
the love seat, you want the dead clock. I press my tongue
to the stain, this error that causes such little harm.
Poet Alexander Duringer (he/him) is from Buffalo, NY and is a PhD student at the University of Utah. He is the editor of Quarterly West. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in South Florida Poetry Journal, Cherry Tree, Poetry Northwest, and Poets.orgamong others.
Artist Josiane Kouagheu (she/her) is a journalist, writer, photographer, painter and poet from Cameroon. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, African Writer Magazine, Kalahari Review, Frontier Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Nomad review, Apricity Magazine, Al Dente Journal and elsewhere.
Gulf Stream Magazine 