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Mark Parsons’ poems have been published in Chariton Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Iodine Poetry Journal, subTerrain, Emerge, Mad Hat Lit, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere.
.
Were I To Say
.
That every time I hear your name
I’ll think of dead mosquitoes, or dead AA battery cells,
or buying a watch from a watch salesman
standing behind a display case filled with watches,
instead of buying it wholesale,
slid off a hook on a bright metal merchandise rack,
or that I’ll consider
what it would be like describing my life
as Getting tanned and fat, ever since I graduated high school,
or that I’ll think
snark in response to what people around me are saying,
only to realize, confronted with faces of shock and dismay, I was speaking out loud.
In this thoughtful and brooding state
the cries of bussers and servers
drift through the shimmering waves of the heat lamps.
“Fi-fo!” they holler, sing
song and angry,
walking past on the other side of the kitchen line.
Full hands in, full hands out.
A caustic reminder
to put away the clean dishes,
supposed to make the dishwasher’s job easier.
Restaurant jobs are all alike: you hate the job until you quit.
But by then you’ve become what you did.
Or force the management to fire you.
But by then you’ve become what you did.
Or become management.
I look forward
to waking up to carapace:
myself and everything around me, carapace
and nothing more.
And wishing the people in blank
would learn to dress.
Well. And wanting to distinguish
between a process and a goal, a tool and means.
For you and me
feeling better’s a matter of order.
I don’t know what to say
about this guy who came in your life before me
except…he’s extremely fluid.
Every situation,
he always comes out smelling like a rose.
I don’t know how.
I’ve seen you two together, later the same night
I got arrested in a grocery store for being Cro-Magnon.
I was kind of relieved. Hell, I was kind of glad.
I took it as a good omen
for any future we might share.
Not long after this, my last dinner rush,
I come across you sitting at a picnic table before dawn
in a park sparsely wooded, so flat and open
you could’ve i.d.’ed me
at fifty yards.
I stop shy of the grill, thinking in case you’re still angry….
You look up from your hands
that are wringing a rolled-up black apron.
Heady with the scent of lighter fluid and cold ashes,
I hear your voice: “Full hands in, full hands out.” Over and over. So soft
a pod snap
would have broken the spell.
Absence is mood; background, everything.
*****
