Maybe the Saddest Thing by Marcus Wicker

Nature of the Beast
    I cooked us dinner. Now ,
    you can wash the dishes.
    This logic’s like
    a jolly, wide-framed stockbroker
    giving an elderly woman the Heimlich
    at a bistro then sneering, Now
    pick your dentures off the tile and finish
    my plate of Brussels sprouts . No, it’s like
    an aardvark snouting a barefoot kid into
    a liquor store, saying, I sniffed the fire ants
    from your sandbox. Now—about that brew.
    Do I have a giant purse full of Geritol?
    Am I saying my wife’s an anteater? No.
    She’s vegan. Of course, she would want
    you to know she’s no linebacker either.
    And she’s not. But one could say Jill
    possesses linebacker-esque attributes
    when bolting through our studio door
    shoulder first, wearing black leather,
    walked-in pumps, tackling her man
    by his leg with her tongue. Go ahead
    scrutinize. But you should hear how
    she tears into me. I’ll kiss her brow.
    She’ll suckle my neck. We’ll descend
    upon the couch, ankles in my lap as I rub
    her feet, and she’ll go, Can you take the dog
    out. I worked all day. And I will
    absolutely lose it, because I’ve been writing
    this all day, which is harder than her gig
    playing with lab rats. Plus, there’s the matter
    of grammar. A man who can dismantle
    and reerect a world with words can certainly
    walk Chauncey, our basset hound, down a flight.
    Yes, I actually tell her this. Not that it matters.
    Jill may as well be shoving me down
    the stairwell when she frowns like I’m shorter
    than I am, exclaiming, Thanks for the help, hun!
    In the courtyard, I watch a portly man
    in a petite blazer work his girth free from
    a steering wheel and waddle toward the building,
    embracing a pack of toilet paper like a life raft.
    Chauncey peers at me droopy eyed, slurs the grass,
    and we lap the creaky man on our way upstairs.
    Hearing the door swing wide, Jill jumps
    off the couch to apologize for what she does
    not know. I stop her two sentences in.
    I kiss her cracked palm, sliding a finger in
    my mouth. We nick the dog
    when she yanks it out, shoving me groundward.
    And we lie there; until the sun joins, then beats us up,
    before I nuzzle her awake saying, Jill. Something
    about what I do has rendered me a bit sensitive:
    to transparent reasoning, stockbrokers, people
    mixing up ability and desire, competition ,
    aardvarks . Do you get what I’m saying here?
    She looks down at my cheek on her chest, smacks
    the top of my head with her lips, and mumbles,
    If I could, I really would trade you jobs.
    I smile—a little nervous. But mostly, relieved.

Maybe the Saddest Thing
    is a shovel sighing earth—
    is what’s stirring beneath a well,
    where I always go: that suck and push
    of air, swelling the chest—its starting
    place. That I couldn’t end there
    is as sad and annoying
    as watching a pet mouse collide and
    collide with its mirrored-glass quarters:
    is any ordinary beast acknowledging himself
    with a battering ram—dense stump
    that slams through the wrong door
    in a smoky hallway, reconstructing
    the face of an elderly woman
    as dumb gold teeth can do.
    It’s the slim probability of that and
    the swinging arm of death falling
    for the woman’s granddaughter
    at the funeral, who has stems as
    if a comet’s trail could begin at an ankle
    and end in a dark, stockinged thigh.
    And just like that, we’re back:
    in the chamber which regulates all.
    If you’re locked outside its door
    or cannot find this room, I sing:
    You are lucky as a virgin.
    If you’re unsure this place exists—
    this saddest thing—
    Fine. Don’t believe in it
    or me. But please believe in this
    latched dirt-box of a house
    speaker strapped to my back, blasting
    everything blue—the same.

 
    Â 
    Â 
----

BEATS, BREAKS & B-SIDES
----

Ars Poetica in the Mode of J-Live
    It’s like this, Anna:
    shell banged bare
    with a bat, Anna
    vat of gunpowder
    shed, Anna
    famished