Forgiveness

Michael had dropped a small box
of China and the crash of it faded
like birds fluttering out of earshot.
He felt paralyzed, magnetized by
the vibrations. It was not unlike
the onset of a migraine, which he
often pictured as a root system spiraling
into his brain, though he sometimes
tried to imagine instead that he was
parachuting down through the sky,
the neighborhood spread out beneath
him. Michael sometimes dreamed
he was crawling toward his mother’s
most recent place of residence—All We Do
is Care, an assisted living facility—
through the fly-infested crabgrass
or down the snow-scrubbed shoulder
of Bannatyne Avenue planning to beg
her forgiveness for not visiting her
more often after dementia had come
trotting into her life like a pack of wild dogs…
And now there was no cinnamon in
his pantry at all (her favorite)! He
looked out at the ice-covered harbor
that lay behind his bungalow and shivered.
He gulped a glass of vitamin water.
During a migraine he could hear a mailbox
closing a block away. He could hear
a spider climbing his baseboards.
He could hear the cold wind parting
as it streamed around the silver stovepipes
standing straight up above the ice fishing
shanties that littered Carlotto Bay . . .
This was what it was like to feel different
types of slippages in the fabric of thinking,
the absolute slowness of what was once
incidental, now interminable, without differentiation
or nuance, the homogeneity of memory . . .
The deer in his backyard didn’t care. The
horns of the cars in Grand Rapids still
blared and blared, rush hour in the city.
The plates he’d dropped were animal
bone and kaolin. Michael wanted to sing,
to hold a high note, octaves higher than
he was able, like ricocheting bullets
careening around a firing range. He
sometimes donned a pair of tap shoes
even though he was no dancer.
He would watch the moonlight slide
across the snowy bay outside and click
against his hardwood floor. But this
was mostly a delusion. Despite the
Morse code of taps speaking to the birds
outside, despite the relaxation,
of his anxiety, despite the warm enamel
on his bright blue radiators. Sometimes
there was nothing left to do in the evenings
but exercise and smoke. He’d drink
ice coffee through a straw and listen
to Pink Floyd or Janis Joplin while
the orange sunset pinged like
a small rung bell. Despite his love
of blizzards he sometimes wished it
were already summer as his guilt and pain
were making him feel claustrophobic.
In June he would sometimes wade into
the shallow water and watch the ducks
and turtles and bluegills. The long thin
fish known as gar pike sometimes
swam by, making eye contact,
one solitary eyeball at a time,
and Michael wished he could see
the world that way, with only
half of his head. A few leeches might
climb onto his toes if he stayed
in the water long enough, craning
their elongated heads. He regretted
the broken “crockery,” as his Uncle
Baziottes liked to call the China,
which Michael had inherited from
his mother after her death from
asphyxiation in the blue-sided fishing shanty.
She’d walked a quarter mile on ice
out to the moonlit shanty (her assisted
living facility was just across the bay)
in her slippers late one night, managing
to light a malfunctioning space heater.
One could only guess whether or not
she’d tried (or wanted) to talk at all,
stung by the cold air, or if she’d simply
curled up beside the hole in the ice, feeling
the pressure of all that water being
forced earthward while simultaneously
being pulled skyward, like her
own moon-inflected, late-life, speechlessness.

***

The Finger

Reggie’s tax refund hadn’t come back
from the state and Reggie needed the money.
But more concerning than that was the possibility
that the missing check might be tied
to something more sinister, and possibly personal.
Reggie knew he wasn’t important
to the state of Indiana, though he lived
there, sometimes paid taxes, followed the
Indianapolis Colts, the Indiana Pacers, and the University
of Indiana’s football and basketball teams
(go Hoosiers!), and drank in several of the local pubs
(where he no longer smoked now that they’d
passed new laws against it). Reggie worked
in a stamping factory, making big unwieldy
fenders for a newly introduced old-
fashioned-looking model of sedan. He’d
lost an inch of his pinky finger in one
of the newfangled fender stamping machines
and ever since his finger looked like a short fat worm
with a bone in it. Now when he ran his
hand over a smooth piece of wood, or went
to bite the absent fingernail (a bad habit)
it surprised him. He reluctantly rode in an ambulance
to the hospital (his friend The Raven
had offered to take him but regulations!)
after it happened—it throbbed!—and on his
return to work the owner of the factory approached
Reggie to warn him away from getting litigious,
saying, Well, tough times in the Midwest and all
for manufacturers, and what with Trump
going loco (he used the word loco) and
starting a trade war, it might be in everyone’s best
interest to just work with us. Did this have
anything to do with Reggie’s missing tax refund?
he wondered now. It was for a paltry $87!
Most of the streetlights near his house had long
burned out. It was ridiculous. Things
were so fucked up. He used to love walking
at night, watching his shadow grow on the pavement
before him then fade just as a new shadow
took shape behind him. Bats would swoop
down through the cones of light and
sometimes he would toss a stone in the air
and a bat would detect it with its radar and swoop
down close to the earth, chasing it. He’d
loved those walks. Now he felt like he
must look suspicious, the buckles on
his leather jacket jingling a little under
the dark shadows thrown down by trees
while the moon held its position or sailed
across the sky. Its light filtered through the leaves
overhead like the thin pieces of glass you’d
have if you shattered a fluorescent light
bulb. Sometimes he’d just stare at the stump
of his finger. It wasn’t so bad. If he’d drunk
some wine or a martini he might show it to
someone. His mother hated it. “I read an
article,” she told him once, “about prosthetic
finger tips.” He worked at the stamping factory
for another couple of weeks and said screw it. He quit
He quit, finally, one afternoon as they were pushing
production. “It’s boom or bust, men!” the
foreman said, was always saying. Reggie’d
been planning to quit for a while. He left a note
on his machine saying they would be hearing
from his attorney concerning his pain and suffering.
He felt happy, walking across the parking lot,
crunching green and brown glass underfoot as
he went. “Hello,” he said to a lone pigeon that
was twirling a cigarette butt in its beak. “What
are you going to do for money?” his friend,
Barney, asked. “What about weed? What about
rent?” because Reggie didn’t have any money
for an attorney. “I just wanted to put the fear
of God in those fuckfaces,” he said, and let out
a kind of guffaw. He sat in his car after downing
about eight beers that night, wondering if he should
risk driving home. He almost felt it would be
a welcome break from having to think, spending a night
in jail, as well as incentive to get up early
the day after his release—start checking out
the want ads, iron one of his button down
shirts, start looking for another goddamn job.

***

David Dodd Leeis the author of ten full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, Willow Springs, and Pleiades). He is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Lily Poetry Review, Off the Coast, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Watershed Review. His collage work, accompanied by an interview, appeared in a recent issue of The Journal. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in 2024. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.