from “Ornithoncology”

B.J. Best

These geese on the water doing all their stupid flapping. Exercise would be good for you, you say. You run four miles a day. I ran for mayor of my heart and lost. But the streets are clean there, the schools good, the taxes low. I pause before I enter the city hall of our bedroom, but then I walk in. I have a few proposals I’d like to discuss.

*

Cancer’s a bitch, people say, but in second grade I was taught a bitch is a female dog, and cancer is not a female dog, it’s not even an albatross, cancer is cancer, and it’s not me, this sack of blood and worry and last night’s enchiladas con salsa verde, and when you wear that green jacket with the flower embroidery I am ready to do you right there in the post office and then mail a postcard to every oncologist in the United States of fucking America and tell them the weather will never be as beautiful as you are.

*

These robins don’t have weathermen, I say to this bullshit subzero March. I’m sorry about everything, then nothing, then everything again. I miss being not scared the same way icicles miss being rain. I’m sorry this fever doesn’t make me feel so hot, I say to the blankets we’ll now have to wash. In the shower, the water hangs like silver braids down your back.

* 

You say you’re trying to imagine me bald. I bite my tongue like a Charleston Chew. I say just because my politics are progressive doesn’t mean my glasses should be. A doctor wanted to shove a tube up my ass, and I let him. And now for an extended whistle solo. The nice thing about being a hairdresser is that you get to talk. The problem with being a hairdresser is all those burning lice.

*

Pheasants come to the roadside to eat gravel; dragons come to me while I sleep. What dreams may come, Billy Shakes wrote, and now he’s dead. Thank you for your service, your patronage. Owls don’t get enough credit, the way they pin nighttime to the earth. This debit card is running on fumes. I’ll gladly repay you tomorrow for a lifetime of kisses today.

© 2019 B.J. Best

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B.J. Best is the author of three books and five chapbooks, most recently Everything about Breathing (Bent Paddle Press, 2019). He lives in Wisconsin.