a literary magazine.
obituary
there are fragments of you here
like the can of tomato paste
that came in the meal kit
that you brought over
one night
(it wasn’t a good night,
but it was a night with you
so now it’s part of our mythology,
something i’d like to index)
and in my shower drain,
your hair has tangled
around the chain for the tub stopper—
stubborn debris
and i still haven’t re-laced
the skate shoes i was wearing
when you lied and had me arrested
the cops unlaced them
before putting me in the holding cell
for an hour or two
i guess it was to prevent me
from killing myself
but the joke’s on them:
i take the subway ads that call
suicide a preventable tragedy
as a challenge
either way, i wore the shoes home that night
unlaced, on july 7th, 2020
when it felt like i could just
keep walking forever
and wanted to
and
and it’s october 6th now,
and “rock legend eddie van halen has died”
i’ve been thinking about using that headline
as a non sequitor in a poem
ever since the news of his death broke
earlier today
there are lots of articles coming out
all about how “rock legend eddie van halen
has died”
and i think that the end
of whatever it is we had
deserves at least as many articles
as there are about how “rock legend eddie van halen
has died”
journalists should be accosting us
for interviews
to ask each of us about
the other
i’d say, “she’s a bitch”
you’d say, “he’s an alcoholic”
and
those would be fragments, too
Bio:
Josh Sherman is a Toronto-based writer. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Back Patio Press, Hobart, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and many others. His debut collection of poems and stories, CHARM REDUCTION, is forthcoming on Gob Pile Press in late-2022. Follow him on Twitter @joshxsherman.