Somewhere Between Childhood & Your Vertical Abandoning You | Alex Dodt
My student, apoplectic, hallucinatively frothing, eyes
the growing boatload of candy on my desk,
asks Will that be curved? Into their test-warm palm
I pour fifteen Skittles. A handful lands
somewhere between jack shit & a shit ton—a scooch
more than some, a tad less than a load,
cousin of bunches—but a handful, I’m sure, is nothing
like a fistful. The difference is what’s being
held. A handful nurses gifted milk Kisses, a newborn’s
wet cheek, a spring cherry blossom
surprise; a fistful clenches dollars, trophies, enough
pills to not wake up. A hand can console
a fist which cannot hold a hand, a prayer, an inchworm
suspended in silk. A fist cannot raise
a basketball & dunk it for a crowd of cul-de-sac kids.
Maybe the difference is how it’s held.
I pull back a handful of Sara’s hair & kiss her naked
collarbone; she grabs a fistful & yanks
after slamming down the phone. Sworn enemies shake
hands in truce; businessmen shake
on greed. Maybe the difference is whether we grab it.
A hand fills with the memory of a father’s
thumb snagged in a steel chain net, a ball bouncing
into a bulbed street. A fist forms
around the memory & when it opens the memory
has the face of a boarded-up town
named for someone not born. The memory returns
home alone, compresses the hand
into a fist into a bomb which is still just a handful
of dust; this body, name, life,
too, one handful of dust held up briefly by another
hand, which is the heart’s,
which is the Milky Way’s, which means the difference
is the hand’s will to be empty.
Alex Reading his poems. Somewhere Between Childhood & Your Vertical Abandoning You…
And Yesterday is…
Yesterday is | Alex Dodt
Teaching punctuation with infanticide
examples was Mrs. Arnold’s way—
Use your scissors to cut kids! she would
read aloud, flashing her incisors
at us as if to say Write that comma,
or else! I would chase my grandmother
around the kitchen after school, my index
finger swinging like a sickle, a scythe,
the comma that separates supper
from cannibalism, squealing Let’s eat
grandma! It was her who taught me
tense too can turn meaning inside out,
unmask a conquest. Every place was another
place in disguise in the stories she told
about New York—stories so old
that in them she is still Cynthia & my mother
a dream. That farmer’s market is a mall now,
she would say, as though the farmer’s market is
still there, the mall its costume, nowhere really
past. I never thought to ask before
her memory went: what does that mean
for the market? For the mall?
During the war that led her to my grandfather
& that he never spoke of, hollowed out
cities shipped rubble to America, the ruins
of Parisian cathedrals building Manhattan
into the sea, my grandfather driving home
atop wreckage he had fled, survived, maybe
sifted through for life. It is very American
to believe with enough effort you can
be anything, to believe God could be
human & a human a slave.
Sitting on the lawn of Calvary Cemetery
in Queens, my grandparents six feet below,
three million interred beside them,
I can’t tell whether the skyline is made
of these tombs, or the Empire
State Building is a mausoleum
blotting out the sun.
About the author:
Every semester the question my philosophy students are most interested in is “What is the meaning of life?” What is the good life? Students want the answer. I find it helps to give attention to language, how articulation affects the answer.
Students ask, “Have you found the meaning of life yet?” but do we find it out there? Or do we create it? And is there the meaning? Or is it different for me and you, different even for each of us at different points in our lives? Students ask, “What should I get out of life?” as though we get to leave with anything in tow! How would it change things (and ourselves) if we asked, “What should I get in life?” What if we asked, “What should I give to life?”
[At this point, the bell rings, students leave, and I have successfully dodged actually answering any questions, because hell if I know!]
Alex is working on a book of poems and a screenplay, and you can find his words in Emerson Review, Stoneboat Journal, Ghost City Review, and other wonderful places across the internet. He founded The Grief Commune, a magazine about the politics of public grief which will publish its first issue this year. Free Palestine!