sam sax

is a woman burying bread beneath her lawn. praying for summer to make whole loaves break in their plastic shells through dirt like so many hands. worry is how i thumb a groove in the stolen jewel case in my back pocket at tower records, the man puts his hands on me & i’m cooked, i’m crooked, red handed, red thumbed. had enough money in my pocket for music & who really needs that bad? all my father’s overtime stocked in our pantry. all my mother’s edges worried smooth below the river of her boss’s hands. who am i who steals music who sells drugs because i love how it sounds. who sold my own good mouth for gold. a man puts his hands on me & i’m his & i’m paid. in the old country women buried what little we had in the dirt & hoped it would make more better on earth. in this country all food is unzipped from its plastic & passes clean through us. my grandmother’s panic is a relic, is bread unearthed from some forgotten dust bowl still dark & moldy & whole. why not eat the hand that feeds you, i think, why not eat the arm, the elbow, the shoulder? why not eat the whole damned body alive

feygele is yiddish for the way i walk into a room. feygele, the anglicized spelling of angel fallen into the dark earthen pits of fashion. feygele from the german vögelein meaning “little bird.” little bird, where do you flame from? where do you bird from little german flame? little singlet split for entry. little finger slipped into the mouth staring hard across the bare wet bar. little bear in his arrogant leather harness, his broad american faith. carry me with you across the fleshless threshold how an old woman carries her language across an ocean so vast, so many fathoms deep one might imagine all life springing from the wet slit of its shoreline. sure i’ve memorized every word for faggot & nearly all their origins are plural & bound together with twine. little string corset wrapped around my brothers’ thighs. little horses wild at the bit to be ridden. little films where the animals are let out but only at night. sure i’ve eaten directly from the hand of a man who taught me the simplest words, gestures of thirst & begging. sure i was hatched into a world that expected me to fly straight into power- lines. but see how hideous hearse-shined my feathers, see my wings spread like a dead book of legs, see my brutal beak a seed-thief in the club light. my first name was flame & i drew moths & mouths alike. feygele as in son of the first preacher with gills. as in the flood that began & refused to quench. as in when i was a child i killed a bird, sparrow i think, with my bare hands so it wouldn’t go on suffering — it was sick. give me your hands, hold my skull between them how you’d hold a bag writhing with birds, a pillowcase thick with lights, two grown boys in gowns howling, a cold mud village consumed by flames, a cage door opening, a blade, a blade, ablaze.

goodbye city. goodbye stoop. goodbye rush hour traffic plume. goodbye feminist qpoc weed delivery group. goodbye cheap noodle spot on the corner. goodbye drag bar next door serving the messy deep into the dead eggplant evening. goodbye drunks screaming about literally nothing below my window. goodbye window & all it’s seen & forgiven. goodbye urine stains talking shit between parked cars. goodbye stars erased from the polluted heavens. goodbye getting my steps in. goodbye highway streaked red & white with shipments of grapefruit trucked in by the refrigerated crateful. goodbye angels dressed in thrifted robes. goodbye locusts — i’ll see you in a decade or so. i’m beguiled by & guided by goodbyes : meaning go ye with god : meaning ghost-flushed & godless : meaning guided by some guy away. who cares who? some new charon who smiles big as a river. who rivers big as i ferry with him toward death. the city you’re in now will never be the city you live in again. the ferryman with his good bile smiles good with his good will toward men. with his good guiding arm. no need for goodbyes when i got this phone where i can visit both my living and my dead. good grief. what’s my root for all this avoidance? for never saying peace to anyone’s living face? for this foolish and footloose decree? my casual excuses for slipping out the back door before the party gets lit? must be the  jew in me. this blood doctrine. my family who survived what i cannot write, never said goodbye, only,i’ll see you again soon. the stories we carried are the only country i’ll pledge my sword to, guiding me even now toward the safety of strange men’s rooms through cruisy city parks. exile is an heirloom. plant your sneakers in the garden so as not to bury your children in the backyard. goodbye park bench. goodbye best friends. goodbye graffiti at union & metropolitan that reads godbye krewl world written moments before that poor girl leapt out into the electric commuter dark. when god closes a door, he bolts it — god the comptroller : god the poorly contoured : god the slumlord. boards up the building before you can flee the house. gone the orator. gone the forest. gone the morgan stop bookshop before i even moved here. everywhere was better before humans came and gave it language. god the skyline’s remarkable this time of day — light tricked through the carbon in the atmosphere. god even the leaves are changing and going away. god the rivers flooded with factory waste and the air’s been replaced with arrogance. my therapist wants closure, but i ghost the session. i text, transition from one state of matter to the next. goodbye city. goodbye stoop. when i moved you were already gone. a simulacrum. a worn photocopy of what brought us in by the refrigerated crateful and when i return you’ll be even further distorted, disoriented organism, a fourth mortgage, an organ exhausted by fingers, yet still at night anyone who sleeps in you’s bathed in gold. to all my dead, i’ll see you again soon. to all my living, let bygones be gone by the time you take this next breath. let’s live instead here, in this transitional state. the instant water evaporates. riding the trains below the city.

what will be left after the last fidget spinner’s spun its last spin after the billboards accrue their thick layer of grit masking advertisements for teeth paste & tanqueray gin after the highways are overtaken by invasive forests after the ministers give up their gods & the rabbis their congregations for drink after new men rise to lead us sheep toward our shearing, to make bed sheets from our hair after the high towers have no airplanes to warn away & instead blink purely toward heaven like children with one red eye after phone lines do nothing but cut the sky into sheet music & our phones are just expensive bricks of metal & glass after our cloud of photographs collapses & all memories retreat back into their privatized skulls after the water taps gasp out their final blessing what then? when even the local militias run out of ammunitions when the blast radii have been chalked & the missiles do all they were built to when us jews have given up our state for that much older country of walking & then that even older religion of dirt when all have succumbed to illness inside the church of our gutted pharmacies when the seas eat their cities when the ground splits like a dress when the trash continent in the mid-atlantic at last opens its mouth to spit what will be left after we’ve left i dare not consider it instead dance with me a moment late in this last extinction that you are reading this must be enough

when i say pre-exposure prophylaxis you think easy fix. greek in origin. an act of guarding. east of here a small temple. inside parishioners strip nude as armless statues, their stone genitals hardening under a chemist’s glare. the garden out front fecund & tended. the garden inside bare. when i say tenofovir disoproxil you think chemical names. saint names. names without origin. an unpronounceable string of letters. the generic names of petty angels. the drug’s molecular makeup applied in & around the eyes & lips. the names of viruses & blind trials. the kept-vial of love. the unknowable side effects of blood. when i say oral emtricitabine you think once a day swallow a small sun & all hymn in you comes undone the way a lit match deads the smell of a public bathroom when i say nucleotide analog reverse transcriptase inhibitor you think thirsty epidemic you push the blue pill through its foil you know each new medicine trails our dead behind it like wedding cans listen you can hear them now can’t you?

spare us your burial rites spare us the first rib the flood, the resurrection spare us your dairy & meats your belief in a life after this one heaven’s a city we’ve been priced out of our mothers fled for more affordable children for the price of liver heaven wants nothing to do with pleasure on earth on this the occasion of my brother’s wedding i need something awful done to my body heaven’s a boy who wants me to crawl through his mother’s midnight-window heaven’s the condom splitting into light heaven’s not a place more a wound i make & pass through when we’re done he asks how many men i’ve fucked this month & not loved spare me the quilt & blankets spare me the look in his eyes when he takes me careful as a poison inside him spare me the lecture on the survival of my body & i will spare you my body

my first drink was in my mother my next, my bris. doctor spread red wine across my lips. took my foreskin • every time i drink     i lose something • no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water • brandy was used to treat everything from colds to pneumonia frostbite to snake bites tb patients were placed on ethanol drips tonics & cough medicines spooned into the crying mouths of children • each friday in synagogue a prayer for red at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen spirits • how many times have i woke strange in an unfamiliar bed? my head neolithic • my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand & flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine he called his woman she locked the door • i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose the other half is my own hand that poured the codeine    that lifted the red plastic again & again & • i’m trying to understand pleasure     it comes back in flashes    every jean button thumbed open to reveal a different man     every slurred & furious permission • i was sober a year before [          ] died • every time i drink     i lose someone • if you look close at the process of fermentation you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body until it’s transformed into something more volatile • the wino outside the liquor store mistakes me for his son

there are more S s in possession than i remembered / my name hinges on the S/ is serpentine / has sibilance / is simple / six lettered / a symbol / different from its sign / sound shapes how we think about objects / the mouth shapes how sound spills out / how the speaker’s seen / a sigmatism is the homosexual mystique / my parents sought treatments / i was sent to a speech / pathologist / sixth grade / a student / she gave me exercises / i was schooled / practiced silence / syllabics / syntax / my voice sap in the high branches / my voice a spoonful of sugared semen / i licked silk when i spoke / i spilt milk when i sang / when i sang sick men tore wings from city birds / so i straightened my sound / into a masculine i / the S is derived from the semitic letter shin / meaning my swishiness is hebraic / is inherited / it’s semantic / no matter what was sacrificed / the tongued isaac / a son against the stone of my soft palate / still i slipped / my hand inside my neighbor’s / waistband & pulled back pincers / sisyphus with the sissiest lips / parseltongued assassin / sassy & passing for the poisoned sea / now when i say please / let me suck your cock / i sound straight / as the still secondhand / on a dead watch.

while he lives here’s a list of images light in a filthy glass pigeon dead on the high spiked window clear plastic bag above him full of water if water could kill everything that lives in you & it can — i sit in a corner of the cancer ward fingering the app that shows me other faggots in this hospital chat with one i might meet in radiology but don’t       instead make the sick man laugh while he’s conscious compliment his gown his new brutal cheekbones that appeared with the chemo if only it were simple as a magnet sucking the bad metals out of him if only i could make a better list more magic      less language periphrastic & restorative if only i met that stranger in the basement & our pleasure rose through the hospital bliss poultice for the sorrow-skinned who sit half-conscious & half-machinery while the sick man lives all i can do is recount the vast pastoral of his illness when he is gone i’m counting on all the good flooding back his beard a collapsed country i’ll refuge inside his laugh a memory so liquid i’ll hear it when anyone opens a window to scare the birds