ISSUE 7

John Popielaski​

​

To the Hawk Who Perches on the Route 9 Streetlight Near the Exit to the Hospital for Mental Illness

​

I lived with someone for about a year

in an apartment with a ninth-floor

balcony that had a stirring view of Rock Creek

Parkway and the winding traffic I felt good

each jam to be detached from and above.

Across the street below, a statue

of a bronze Taras Shevchenko stood.

I kept binoculars on hand for specificity           

and trained them on the statue, on the traffic,

on the birds that disappeared into the trees

in Rock Creek Park, on the exclusive

neighborhood of low roofs to the west.

I had superior perspective.

I was terribly seduced. When I came down

to eat, I drank too much.

My few associates moved furniture,

made wisecracks, art. One night a schoolboy

aimed a pistol at my heart.

I fell so many times it was a miracle

I’m not in fragments far from home.

​​​​

​​

​​

Change of Plans

           

                 for Al

 

Of all the things to interrupt the spectacle

of human grandiosity, the bacillus

behind the common eye infection

ranks among the most ignoble.

Even if the legend isn’t true,

what does it say about our durability,

our fortitude, that an infection

held facetiously to be transmitted

by a fart into a pillow is enough

to send us back to lower elevations, 

to pedestrian topographies?

I can’t deny that you must squint

into the eyes of someone else and ask

like a petitioner, “How does my eye look?”

I cannot deny that it looks red, inflamed,

an eye at home in the Middle Ages.

You already knew that, though.

I heard your cell phone clicking in your tent

the last two nights and saw the glow

as you held up each selfie to your face

and were confronted with the evidence

of ocular asymmetry

that you can’t keep the world from seeing

in the light of day and thinking of

as scrofulous and unattractive, a condition

that the world has no desire to approach.

So we abandon our original plan

to hike the Northwest Basin

and the Knife’s Edge, to look down

on something grander than ourselves.

I ask if you have heard about the blind man

who ascended Everest.           

You resort to expletives.

We bear our packs along a trail

we do not photograph or tell

a soul about when we get home.

You open up about the rescues and extractions

you performed when still a fireman.

I ask for clarification

on the delicate logistics

of extracting someone’s strangled

penis from a metal cock ring.

In the truck, descending, I’m still thinking

it’s disturbing what a pleasure can become.

​​

​

​

​

​