Dementia
At first her pauses were commas,
synapses between now and next,
uncertainties, ellipses waiting
for closure, her mind only partly
cloudy with sunlight seeking sky
like a sentence ending, expecting
the next capital letter, but in time.
stops. lingered. longer. longing.
Now, her gauze-eyed gaze brackets
air; her words stumble in syntax
shards, muffling screams; her steps
stutter shuddering like inverted
exclamation points¡¡¡
In this time of anxiety,
I hide. From the fear. My fear of fear.
Fear of touching. All those virus-besieged
canned goods in the grocery stores. I’m
scrubbing my hands with antibacterials.
Wearing two masks. Fear of touching
you, too. Will you respond? In kind?
Will you recoil? As if I’m virus-besieged?
Fear of commitment. To you. To my
current job. Not a career, just a job.
My IDP asks, “What do you want to achieve
this year? In five years?” I might as well
write my plans on sand, on a beach, sea-level-rise eroding.
I might as well write my life plans on Snapchat.
Deleted after 30 days if/when unopened.
Fear of failure. Or success. Fear of wars. Even peace is frightening,
because then I should be happy, right? Fear of high prices. Fear
of forest deforestation and floods and hurricanes and polar ice melt
and mortgages and tribal politics and Kardashian clickbait and my car
breaking down and a tooth cracking when I have no dental coverage
and rogue dogs and road rampages. That’s me, jumping, like an
emaciated polar bear from shrinking ice floe to ice bergs calving.
Don’t even mention cyberattacks on my already low
credit card rating by Russian hackers demanding
cryptocurrency ransoms. I’ve never committed a crime.
So I fear police will stop me for some minor infraction.
“6:00 pm News Flash: man shot while failing to change
lanes correctly. Police report that he wasn’t obsequious
when questioned.”
So I hide.
With my pulse ratcheting.
Like 7.2 seismic spikes.
Under fault lines.
And I quiver.
With one eye peeking.
Fearfully.
Modern Romance
She wore toxic mascara.
It scribed her face in icicles
when she cried, often.
She filed her nails
into penknives to carve
down his back, his chest, his arms, his face
in romance, in anger, as often.
He bathed in Agent Orange.
It wafted from him as mephitis
from sulfurous sinkholes.
His pointed, steel-toe stingray
boots, sharpened on acid,
bit into her with each embrace.
They married when the wind
screamed, guests applauding
their divorce.
Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in Panoplyzine, Route 7, Poets Reading the News, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Underwood Press, Wingless Dreamer, Dillydoun Review, In Parentheses, and more. His chapbook Once Planed Straight is published through Spartan Press.