Marc Pietrzykowski lives in Atlanta, GA, USA, and gets his hair cut on the front porch. He writes and makes other things as well, and should have a book of poems coming out later this year from Zeitgeist Press. His writing is influenced by many other authors that he has read in the past, by people who hate reading and never do, and by love.
TOP FIVE THINGS MARC HAS ENJOYED DOING WITH POTATOES
1. Eating them
***
2. Making them into ink stamps for Christmas cards
She's laid his clothes out on the bed—the pants
and shirt embroidered with smiling bears,
the socks pointing down to little boots
ready for bronzing—she's put them in order
and now leans against the mattress, touching
her swollen, puckering navel with a finger,
trying to imagine how he'll smell, wondering
if she'll be like her own mother, if they'll let her
keep him this time. I'd like to see 'em try
and take him away, she whispers, and begins
to stuff the shirt and pants with balls of cotton.
A truck door slams and she jumps, crouches,
listens to her mother's voice: That little
slut. Ain't having no bastard in this house.
Right. Like Daddy'd never caught her, legs up
and wriggling beneath Mr. Kedalis
from next door, as though she never sobbed
the whole vodka-smeared Saturday night away
while her sister banged against the headboard
under Daddy's girth, three houses down.
Their voices stained the wallpaper, and she knew
she had to get away, only away, anywhere.
Slinking back to bed, she crawls beneath
the grey threadbare sheets and squeezes tight,
but not too tight, on the soft cotton-filled shirt
appliqued with happy bears standing in a circle.
Three days from now, on her eighteenth birthday,
she'll watch as the highway rips by beneath her,
drag deep on a Pall Mall, and wonder if
perhaps she should've stayed, seeing as how
the pimply boy beside her driving
his daddy's car will surely drop her off
at the bus station, then flee. Don't need him
either, needs no one but her own little man,
her own loved thing to hold and fuss over,
let them try and take him this time—when at last
they come to the door with their hands bent like hooks,
she knows exactly what she will say:
Don't you dare touch him, or I swear,
people everywhere will start hearing about
all those things you made me promise
never to tell a soul—
Car after car simmers, waiting,
and in car after car we sit and stare
straight ahead.
Then we shift forward of a piece,
lights ticking and small flags
marked "funeral" suction-cupped to each hood;
once over the railroad tracks the sheriff
waves us on past the trailer park
and the children frozen on the playground,
balls unbounced, swings silent, staring
at that first, brilliant wagon
and the hidden cargo
they've heard tell of—could be
one of them has seen the skin preserved
and waxy as plastic fruit, the dopey curl
of the lips that never set quite right,
the eyes not so much shut as drawn closed;
once we pass, that child will stand at the centre
of a patch of beaten down grass, expounding,
telling all any of us will ever know
to the circle of little ears gathered
in the shadow of the jungle gym
at the edge of the park, beside the old trailer
that's half-rusted and sagging low
in the middle; one would think it uninhabited
but for the few strands of Christmas lights
that hang, lit, along one corner,
serving notice to the world
that breath is still taken here.
The metro slows, squeaks, stops,
people board, disembark, the 52 bones of the feet
rippling in shoes and slippers and sandals,
echoing everywhere, from
toenails to platform to high arching walls.
Have we gone too far? Ensured our own extinction?
On the bench sit the sallow old men who once sent
other's sons to war, they pick their teeth
and bicker about money. They watch the crowd
surge, watch it seep away.
What new species are we creating the conditions for?
They watch the commuters come and go
and serve out their sentence,
the same one we all serve:
live on and wait for the leap
out of your mind, your hunger,
toward something darker or lighter and probably both.
"There are some experiences that cannot withstand the glare
of public light without being extinguished"
—Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
At work, each day, for one hour, only,
the letters lie still in their bins, birds
sleep and preen on the sill silently,
and I sit, awake to light,
and light
comes in to me and reclines
on my cheek, on my crossed
wrists, seeps
between what makes bone bone—
for one hour, and then
the People in Charge
return to their harvest offices
and command me: "Up, up!"
and I get up
and work, and they
cannot understand why the sight of me
makes them itch,
why my idiot face smiling
the way it does
so drives them to distraction.
Or perhaps they know too well
the hush in which light can be heard.
Perhaps it is the same hush
that threatens them every half-fogged morning,
and perhaps in every tongueless night
they keep watch
for that flood of darkness
bearing deafly down—
perhaps that is why
I am made the enemy,
a sodomite of sunlight,
an infidel of rest,
a sorry dreg who yet is master
of their own industry
and, in fact, of an entire economy
that never balloons or crashes—
or, again, perhaps they only wonder
what it is that I am refusing
to tell, why I put on airs,
just who in the hell I think I am;
well, I don't know who in the hell I think I am,
or even how to begin such a weary,
flat, stale and unprofitable endeavour,
hemming an abstraction
with ever more finely spun
abstractions—what I do know
spans an hour, only,
even when the sky is darkly churning,
for thunder too is a form of stillness,
drowning out our monstrous babble,
leaving us properly cowed.
