ISSUE 7

            John Popielaski​

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

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            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.

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            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.

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