shevy

 

A Pantoum to Fill a Room

This is how you explained it to me on our knees

that you had never prayed for a miracle

but wrote a signed letter in your heart to God,

switched into lotus pose for a transmission of thought.

That you had never prayed for a miracle,

in a life lived off stage while raging like a performer,

switched into lotus pose for a transmission of thought,

how our desire is to merely be an illusion confirmed.

In a life lived off stage you raged like a performer.

We met as your fires blazed uncontained.

How our desire is to merely be an illusion confirmed,

is that why we were indistinguishable from my place to yours?

We met as your fires blazed uncontained,

1920’s studios along the same beat up strip of pain

It’s why we were indistinguishable from my place to yours,

bed bugs, flooded sinks, laundromats and creaky floors.

1920’s studios along the same beat up strip of pain

Slumlord tenants we met in the rain

Bed bugs, flooded sinks, laundromats and creaky floors.

You grew up in the church but had never prayed for a miracle.

Slumlord tenants we met in the rain

got jobs at the same place and felt our way.

You grew up in the church but had never prayed for a miracle.

That’s how you explained it without ever saying.

Got jobs at the same place and felt our way

drank coffee, ate pastries, felt love summon itself

that’s how you explained it without ever saying,

How our tiles of grief were rearranged into a pane.

Drank coffee, ate pastries, felt love summon itself,

gently melting, tires screeching, horns blaring,

how our tiles of grief were rearranged into a pane,

this is how you explained it to me on our knees.

-joshua turek

community college assignment

Why I stare at my phone. A few nerds my age decided to market visual systems appealing to my base level urges, release chemicals in my brain, and rewire my thinking to require their sensory input on a daily basis. The hunger for information became insatiable when my own self interest, vanity, was threaded into the experience. I stare at my phone because I was taught convenience as the hallmark of progress when my dad would melt his ice cream in the microwave just enough that he could scoop it out of the carton unabated. I was alive before there were phones to stare at. I used to memorize my friend's numbers, even my first girlfriend in my early 20s, I called her the day after she gave me her phone number at a bar. I don't remember her phone number now. I couldn't tell you my mom's phone number either. I stare at my phone but never to learn the combinations required to call my mother should my phone ever fail me.  You only need to memorize a couple phone numbers in case you end up in jail. I know my girlfriend's phone number (Santa Cruz area code) and my brothers (currently not on speaking terms but he'd owe me one for picking him up there one time). Why I stare at my phone, it got bad when Instagram arrived or maybe it was when my dad told us he had cancer. Leaving his chemotherapy appointments in the Valley near his house to drive ourselves to our apartment in Venice, my brother and I would go to our separate rooms to stare at our phones. The world is curated in the phone, chaotic outside of it. The world is curated to chaos inside the phone too but it's my chaos. It's the chaos I've told the algorithms I'd like to see and so they show me it between their advertisements also geared to me. My phone is a commercial and the content between it is my own interests serving as products of myself to myself. I heard Christopher Hedges on public radio late one night years ago driving home to Venice saying image-based societies tend to destroy themselves. I parked my car, sat there and listened because this was before Instagram, before my dad was sick, when I was full of unbridled strength and a head thick with curly hair. I listened to this thinker think out loud because that's what we did back then, we listened.

-joshua turek