so much depends
upon
a red wheel
chair
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
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Fetish

The Method

At the Whole-Foods Store

Triptych Featuring Three Women

After Making Love in a Drafty Attic, I Say Goodbye to You and to the Women You've Come From

Primogeniture

Catechism

Body

Desire

Fetish

The night like a drunkard’s
kiss, I parked
outside the CVS and went

inside. I can’t recall
my purchase—candy bars, birth
control devices? I do

remember the cute
girl behind the counter
who took one look at me,

then my arm—the hand
cradled at my side, a blushing
tuft of pink flesh poking

from my sweater’s rolled cuff.
She said, That’s cute, and meant
it. How impossible to think

she thought this arm was cute,
was something she didn’t have to learn
to like or to ignore. Something

that she loved already.
What an assault to be
her broken thing.

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The Method

Short, obscured in scrubs, no discernible rings
on an important finger. Try to seem witty

as she scrapes plaque off your neglected enamel.
She says: your great smile, your great laugh.

Try to lie nonchalantly in the dentist’s
chair while a pretty girl prowls your lazy grooming

habits. When she asks about flossing, about
your methods, her oblique reference

to mechanics, remember she is not the woman,
a stranger, who approached you in the bar,

her something-and-tonic sloshing from one of her fists,
and felt each tiny finger budding from

your stunted arm, and giggled Nails!
Jenni is professional, concerned

with gums. She uses implements to reach
deep fissures. She gives you a lesson in brushing

although you’re thirty; she is younger. You want her
to speak clinically, not to be careful,

passionlessly ask you how you floss,
with what if any extra tools. You want her

to assume you do it same as everyone,
fingertips blueing as they’re cinched by line.

You know you’re lying. You love her in the way
men love waitresses: because she attends

to you. Because she is tan in winter, has high-
maintenance eyebrows, because she teaches you.

Because she isn’t sure how to ask, but asks.

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At the Whole-Foods Store

Scooping lentils from a bulk bin, I watch
A little boy scoot behind his mother’s leg.

His hands clutch her Levi’s seams, his mouth
Opens and closes on words he’s afraid

To say. He watches me. And I
Watch him. Hello, and he wilts

Behind her legs completely.
Unable to keep from looking, he pops

His head out in rapid bursts, prairie
Dogging, then retreats.

His mother talks to the woman behind
The register.  He starts tugging her

Sleeve, and her fingers twist
His hair.  I am almost finished

With the lentils, but I came in here
Wanting loose pekoe, too, which I haven’t

Scooped out yet.  But what I really want
To do is leave, to give that little boy

His voice so he can tell his mother
A man without an arm is in the store.

I twist the wire tie around
The plastic baggie’s throat, slap

A label on it and scratch the number
Of the bin on that.  Mom, he says, that man

Doesn’t have an arm, his husky whisper
Loud enough for everyone to hear.  She

Stops her talk, sees me for the first time,
Flushing.  She is ashamed

Of him, for me.  She says his name, offers
Me a watery gaze.  Don’t

Worry, I tell her, I get that all the time.

previously published in Kaleidoscope
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Tryptich Featuring Three Women

1.

Worried about being pregnant, she
said, I’d hoped, you know,
to maybe get a test or something
to see if it’s genetic

2.

My mother has two stories
about my birth.
First, the doctors
wanted to remove
my left hand so my arm
could end cleanly in a nub;
second, another
boy like me was born
after she’d gone back to work
floating on third-trick
in the hospital—two weeks,
the boy came in and died,
failure to thrive.

3.

Her smooth white skin floating
over the patchwork quilt—its
mannered shapes in primary
colors, the white of the wending
stitchery.  She asks, rub my
back, and I begin, my body moving
in rhythm with this massage,
and she says, C’mon, your
good hand, and I sit
back, start over.

<top>

After Making Love in a Drafty Attic, I Say Goodbye to You and to the Women You've Come From

On the mud room’s cream
linoleum, a tumble of shoes
against the country bench:
My sneakers untied, and I

notice because I’m always kicking
them off, cramming
them on, breaking the heels’
plastic molds because I am

lazy, leaving them
tied. Your mother follows us
to the door, her mother jostling
behind. I stoop to tie

my shoes, loop
the lace’s standing end around my left
arm stump to hold it still,
twist the working end twice

around the bight to lock
the knot. Kneeling, I smile up
to your grandmother, tell her nice
to have met her. I watch

the flush
disperse across your dampened
face. Your grandmother watches my hand
pull both loops taut, one at a

time. Her grin obscene
in crisp spring light, eyes
like a lecher’s whose thoughts are stuck
on young bodies gliding

under clothing. Nodding
like a bobble doll, she had nerve
enough to say she wanted
to watch me tie my shoes.

<top>

Primogeniture

Reading Gavin's poetry, I see his Indiana
fields grow thick with corn, see
white waves that shiver
tasseled wheat with every

wind.  It is easy for me
to find myself outside
the house he lived in,
to look toward three

horizons and see
the fable of the county
large as barns.
The fourth horizon

spits out its factory
where the military burns
nerve gas, unmakes its chemical
weapons, hot summer

days. How benign it seems
to those who sleep
downwind, windows
open to admit

the fecund breath of a sleeping
country.
                Looking
at my body, nobody sees

three good limbs or guesses
that behind the aborted
fourth my father humps
Vietnam, his cut hands cupping

Agent Orange to wash
that country from his filthy
skin, glad for any
liquid.  Dead now, cancer.

No one guesses his bloated
tongue. In Gavin’s poem, no one
runs down rows
of corn while soldiers

unlock the gates
around the plant, admit
men who’ll burn
those chemicals to nothing.

<top>

Catechism

Tall as a commandment, the catechist looms
over the classroom, plastic

frames thick around her lenses, waiting
for the ruckus to end. We’re

spastic after kickball, barely old enough
to leave our homes.  At St. Rose,

I was punished for standing
between periods, not finishing

arithmetic  quizzes because I could
add already. As we rattled

at our desks, swaddled in sweat-soaked
clothes from Freeze Tag, the

catechist told us
settle, that we had  important lessons to learn.

Kristen sat sobbing over a fractured
wrist, undiagnosed, while the teacher talked

of heaven, it’s perfection. She looked at me
and said, Your arm, in heaven, will be

perfect. You’ll be whole.

<top>

Body

How to explain
a body I feel but don’t
quite inhabit.  How hard
to feel the body that pulses
beyond its walls of flesh.
The things I have lifted, crushed
open with the palm I do not
own.  When you ask me
about my body, I will answer you
from another body, a textbook
body complete with its
appurtenances. Open,
I admit the piercing
sting of a foreign body inside
my body.  Already there
are too many bodies.  And how
can I explain the body I do
not have which is the body
I always feel?  I feel
you with it, you can
touch me through it.

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Desire

And when you ask me what
I want, your fingers
tracing symbols on my skin,

could I remind you
you once slipped your mouth

over my hand, took it whole
inside just for
a second? 

Nothing, everything
you do is fine

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All poems by Joshua Kupetz.