Jack Otterberg

don't ask me how I got entangled
in musky green scrubs and
dimly-lit rooms
where the mad confirm their faces
...

she wore tragedy
like a gold medal
won at the post office.
her voice so wispy, her hair thin—
...

Bob:
I've gone off to Arizona,
where the arid plains stretch and yawn
under a dusty air,
...

the ambulance howls and honks
its red voice down 17th,
past Knoll's polished brick
and Lamar's glowing open sign
...

you texted me a lot— about
sadness and other things—
I wrote a poem to soothe yours,
or to attempt such a feat.
...

I walked out past Lamar's Donuts,
holding my hands together in my
sweatshirt pocket, breath frothing
in the February air. walking as if dead,
...

time comes to you so rudely—
you wake up and find out you didn't wake up.
just here, in another world, the ethereal
glow of white light
...

1.
I'm thinking we don't ask to be born
in this game.
the snowflakes flicker on your hair, and
...

open your eyes.
it's dark here. nighttime. Neruda said the stars shiver,
so they're shivering here.
a "watch for deer" sign wags in the wind—.
...

I dream the dreams that can't be dreamed. the fog sniffs the road I walk on, as I peek my eyes through its thick gray body, past Knoll down to Q Street, where,
if my phone says I squint hard enough, I can see Lamar's Donuts. the urban crawl of cement rooftops scatters below the chain-linked sky, and in this life, I find it unsuitable for dreaming.

though in another, I may have been a newspaper boy hollering on street edges, poking holes in the air with my yellow rotten teeth, my poor man's gray-fabric cap slightly bending to the left. I can see it— I have eyes like porcelain, dead and pretty. the musky scent of smoke swells the air, which I then didn't think much of, but now it throws me into a whirl with how warm this mutated February day is.
...

For Robert Anderson; In Memoriam


you died on a
...

days come to die here— in the belly of our unsaid words. I used to believe every person had an absence. a dying voice that only survived small lapses- like forgetting your identity at the grocery store. now I know that sound of foreignness is really the sound of kindredness. the two opposites are really the same.

every night I wait by the doorstep for my dog to come back from the dead. his stabbing bark could warm me on these nights I forget my veins aren't blue. I want to be alone with him. so alone I remember what it meant to live without words. but I must hear his crisp bark crack the air— just to know his ghost is coming to warm the bed.
...

I don't know what I'm doing here—
with you,
in a dusky room when the midnight windows
allow a syringe of moonlight
...