Category: Poetry

Indigestion

At the tail end of a stomach ache
that has lasted for hours,
like they did when I was young
and in pain more often than not.
Doctor after doctor told me
nothing was physically wrong
because nothing ever showed up
in their tests and pictures and probes.
Nobody could explain why I’d be
doubled over in pain almost daily.
As it turned out, they were looking
at the wrong part of my body.
The problem was in the attic
rather than the basement.
Abuse leaves its marks, inside and out.
The blow to the face, to the heart —
they both follow a path to the gut.
Anyway tonight was just too much dairy.
The family I’ve chosen is better
than the one I was given.

/ / /

15 December 2024
Charlottesville VA

Thanksgiving Day, 2024

The Dallas Cowboys are playing
on a totally legal stream in the living room.
When I was kid in Lenox my mom got me
a pair of Cowboys pajamas because
they were my cousin Todd’s favorite team
and he was my favorite person.
We’d play The Incredible Hulk
(Bixby/Ferrigno version)
and he’d always let me be the Hulk.
When it was time for the gamma rays
to change me from a mild-mannered nerd
to a big green monster, I’d whip off
the shirt of the Cowboys PJs,
throwing it to the ground just like
Big Lou did on the TV.
And of course I’d flex my arms,
holding them down low in front of me
and growling just like the Hulk.
Maybe an octave or so higher.
The Cowboys are playing because
it’s Thanksgiving. The first one
with my new partner.
It’s a day we have qualms about celebrating,
although we got prepared plates
from the grocery store and heated them
in my tiny oven, which smells like it’s
poisoning us every time we use it.
After eating (which we did before noon
because these days we get up earlier
than either of us would probably like)
we went to the queer anarchist bookstore
and sat in the comfy chairs and leafed through
books of protest art and queer resistance
and anarchist theory and then we bought stuff
because we always do.
I’m pretty far down the page
without having mentioned that three hours away
my parents and my sister and my sons and my former wife
are all having Thanksgiving dinner together, a dinner
to which I wasn’t invited and which I learned about only
in passing during a phone call.
It’s 8 PM. My kids haven’t called, but my sister did.
When I was growing up, this is the kind of thing
my mom would have made me feel guilty about
if there had ever been any chance at all of my breaking away
to spend a holiday elsewhere, which of course
there never was.
I decided not to be that parent to my sons,
so I told them I only cared about two days a year:
Father’s Day and my birthday.
On those two days, I said, I’d like a phone call
if we can’t be together.
Perhaps I overplayed my hand,
given that now nobody even thought to ask
if I’d like to join in the family celebration.
And sure, I don’t speak to my parents,
but I’ve already seen them twice this year,
when each of my boys graduated,
and that was bearable enough that…
Anyway, it matters, but rather than say anything
I’ll just write it down here in these lines
and then go back out to the living room,
where my partner has turned off the Cowboys
and is reading one of the books we bought today
after our first Thanksgiving together,
just the two of us. I don’t know what Todd is doing,
but he’s probably with his former wife and
my aunt and uncle
and his daughter and her husband
and a bunch of dogs. That invitation
didn’t come either, but they’re too far away
to have expected it.
Funny how these days turn back the clock.
Funny.

/ / /

28 November 2024
Charlottesville VA