Tag: Iain Grinbergs

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

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Ablation

They wheeled me in while a nurse said she liked my stripy socks. That was the last clean sentence I heard. Before, the doctor said Cooked and Cure and Pilot. The room was sharp and silent. I woke up three times. I was machine. I was equation. My mouth was sticky when I tried to say Stop and groaned. They kicked me back under. The tech said Get it yet? The doc said No. He said it wouldn’t hurt, but I was all alien and probe. A spaceship built wrong. Earth fell. A strange drum played on. I was mutation, stretched from muzzle to toe. I came to in a bright room. The doctor said Close and AV node. A puppeteer strung my EKG. I slept and woke and tried to get up. My heart auditioned beats. The nurse caught me. She held me like a doll, soft at the seams. My voice box dropped and rolled along the floor.

*

Letter from the Barber Shop

It’s when my barber says she almost tore through
her hand with a chainsaw that I think about death—
how it might come blundering like blindfolded men groping

different parts of an elephant, declaring This is it! No, this is it!,
or knowingly like when the Florida cop caught me going
twenty over, saying Do you know how fast that was?

and my thinking, Yes—it was by design. Why do I take great pleasure
in cracking sometimes? Is it control I mistake for freedom,
like a dog baring its teeth, still leashed? Yes, there’s a thrill

in the not-quite, in the almost. Even now, I replay my barber’s laugh—
how casually she said blood and root and earth. How surprising
we can be and how wondrous it would be for Christ to actually come,

despite my early atheism, not cloaked in the chaos of trumpet-sound
but silence, the kind that drips through drywall, the hallway light
turned on not to accuse but to awaken. Isn’t interruption

what we fear most? The Where have you been? Your hands
smelling like nicotine and whiskey. Grace not so much a ladder
but a nurse saying, Silly you—now, you won’t do that again, will you?

*

Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Panama City Beach

I clocked into Dusty Dick’s hungover, having stained
downtown with Bud Light and Captain Morgan,
smelling like sweat and Lucky Strike, still wearing
the eyeliner from the night before at Splash Bar,
where I once tried to kiss a basketball player from
high school, the seat of my Levi’s wet from sitting
in a puddle of my gin and tonic. The beach wasn’t beautiful—
it was a means to an end, and the end kept coming,
every Spring Break another rerun, the same spent
mess, Front Beach Road nothing but neon madness,
a gusset of brake lights, trying to get to my new
food runner job where I soon dropped a seafood platter
bigger than a hammerhead’s head, even though I said,
I don’t think I can handle that. A blonde-haired waitress
was nice enough to help me collect the snow crab legs
and scallops and hush puppies and coleslaw and tartar sauce
from the dark wood floor, our hands sticky and greasy,
my saying, Sorry, sorry, so sorry, and her saying, It’s fine, fine, fine.
They fired me five minutes later, and I couldn’t get
my share of the tips because I hadn’t worked there long.
What was I to do but go to the nearest bar and sing
Kesha until my skull shook enough, then share
a Newport with an Air Force guy who turned out
to be a drag queen—her name was Spite and she came
from Tennessee. She said, People don’t like when you make
the Bible Belt glittery, and I nodded because I knew—
the back seat of my ‘92 Honda still had a few
fake nails as mementos from another night, when I told
myself not to drive and somehow made it back from
St. Andrews quite alive, then the next morning I managed
to pass an Intro to Psych test, slipping in before the professor
locked the door. She said she had lost it after no one cared
for her research on mice and moved to Key West,
and I thought, What if psych professors are actually
all crazy?, but I failed remedial algebra twice—
I was writing sad sonnets on Scantrons, then getting
sunburns on the Tilt-a-Whirl before scooping
ice cream at my new job, smelling of sour milk, playing
made-up games like Gum Ball Hockey and Banana Ball,
crying in the walk-in cooler before popping out
and saying, Welcome! Our latest flavor is pumpkin.

*

Letter from the Farmers Market

It’s when a boy, his face sticky with guava,
licks the rim of a honey jar—his eyes locked on mine,

defiant—that I think about how incredible this world is in all
its violations, like when a Pomeranian cocks its leg by

a crate of purple potatoes, someone laughing: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Sometimes, it’s endearing to ruin what was almost perfect—

a woman haggling over peaches like she’s bargaining
for more time, the air smelling like tulsi and sourdough, while a toddler streaks past

a box of Seminole squashes still furbished with earth. Adam means
formed from the ground, and I think of my own body—

the congenital rhythm that once held me, a rogue pulse burning through
my chest, a shortcut in the heart, a bypassing signal meant to wait

its turn but creating a dare, the dizziness like the soul punching up for air.
And there I am, holding a wet head of lettuce next to a wedge

of watermelon clenched in a baby’s fist, the sun stumbling across
the roof of a Cuban food truck, remembering the knock

of waking up three times on an operating table, then the farmer saying:
Hi? Hello? Will that be card or cash? The world is what it looks like.

*

Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.