Poetry By Jason Davidson

Kingsley Ravenscroft CC




Geese

I dreamt last night of Barnaby. He was me for just a few months when I was a child. I wore a black top-hat and a fake moustache and said many words for hours on a stage with lots of people. There were very bright lights and some clapping. The woman who signed up to be my mother (before asking about the return policy) ran lines with me for weeks. I didn’t care about the people in the seats, but I wanted to impress her. She was a heroin addict and also iridescent. She smelled like petrichor and I knew that long sleeves meant falling leaves. No tree can hide her nakedness forever. One of the lines was something that I can no longer remember and it made her laugh. I promised that I would get it right on opening night. I pinky swore. She never showed and an older girl taunted me backstage. She told me that my mother did not come. I said she wasn’t even my mother. This is why dreams are better than golden eggs. In my dream, the woman who was a robot-mother is sitting front row center, watching me star as Barnaby in Babes in Toyland. I smash the line like a sweet cymbal, she smiles, and after the show is over, I tell her about the mean girl who plays Mother Goose. We find her in the parking lot and my almost mother snaps her fingers, very quick, and a flock of emerald green geese appear. They yell at the mean girl and they carry her away into the sky. Sometimes all you need are geese. I say, Thank you, mom. She pushes the long sleeves of her sweater up over both of her forearms and her skin is as clean as a new storm cellar.






Reno

I am swimming amidst a school of fish,
silver scales, whale bellies, old cigarette smoke,
and aborted dreams in a casino in Reno.
I’m leaning into myself, I suppose,
or finding that I’m as well defended as ever,
checking in and my mouth is moving open and
shut, there is a young woman with an improbable
name and open, gaping gills behind the counter.

She asks,
How is your day going, sir?
I say,
My mother-in-law is going to die tomorrow.
It was not expected.
She pauses for a moment,
as if she’s drowning while holding her breath,
restless within the warm, dry air.
She says,
So, you’re having a good day?

She is opening and closing her small mouth,
a minnow with tongue and lips and teeth,
searching for the bait, the hook, or the rapture.
I leave our bags in the tower room.
I wonder if Rapunzel is in the room next door,
her body aquatic, screaming as she
fucks a faceless man, senseless as she lies quiet,
afterwards.

The intensive care unit is five minutes away.
There, my husband’s sister lies, she is screaming silently,
in vehement, violent denial of her survival.
We talk with the trauma surgeon,
as if this sort of thing is commonplace, like 
doodles from an erasable pen.
This woman has rearranged the insides of her patient,
put them back together like a craft project or a shadowbox.
This woman is not Rapunzel, but she is 
as pink as a starfish or a newborn.

On the floor above,
my husband’s mother lies, and her eyes are open,
but she looks through me like a dull prism, and I feel again,
that I am struck inside of something, this is a bad civil war
reenactment, I have put on a wig and I’m soaking up the smoke
from a thousand cannon balls. I am not acting, but I am trying.
I am the commander-in-chief of the dying mothers club.
I want to hold my husband. I want to be selfish within my own grief.
I want someone somewhere, to suggest something:
Coral beds, sea foam, drowning now, relief.

The woman who is caring for my other mother is not Rapunzel.
She smells like cinnamon, she reminds me of someone.
She reminds me of the last woman I will ever sleep with.
I know how she felt, and how she smelled, she lived on
the fourteenth floor, a couple of blocks from Kapiolani.
When I left her apartment, I was terribly sad,
when I leave this woman, I will be terribly sad,
with so much baggage packed that I will be overflowing,
row-boating away back to that awful goodbye place, the space
where I’m flailing around, negotiating with myself.

I say to my husband,
Everything will be alright.
Sometimes, I am a good, strong actor.
I come from the gut, and I’m able to make myself believe it.
I hold him very tightly, I remind myself that we’re both still alive.
When I am sick from the hospital,
I sit alone in the cold car, my fingers are claws, tapping at
my phone, the droning in my head is deafening:
I am writing a new play about violence, and I am terrified by it.
The ones I’m writing are bright eyed, they are compliant.
I can’t remember anymore what I do for a living,
so I keep tapping at my phone instead of breathing:
Amie is inside it, there, filled with kindness.
Perhaps Jesse and Lyric will bring over a casserole this time.

I think I’m supposed to be doing something,
but I can’t remember any of my lines.
The surgeon, the woman working on my sister,
asked me earlier, she said,
And what is it that you do?
But I am not submerged in water, I’m only drowning
in the open air, I open and close my mouth,
and I do not answer.

Back at our tower room, our war room, our control center,
the sea water has seeped in already, waist high,
and Rapunzel is swimming around, a half-drowned daughter.
I tell my husband that I am writing a play that I am terrified by.
He is making telephone calls, he is holding on to himself,
he is saving both of us from all that waits in that dry water.

I look out the window of our tower room,
Out in to the vast open, the ocean of Reno.
I am swimming amidst that school of fish,
Silver scales, whale bellies, old cigarette smoke,
And aborted dreams in a casino in Reno.

​


Jason Davidson is a poet, fiction writer, playwright and performer. He's written and directed over 200 works of experimental theatre and his one-act plays have been widely published. His poetry has appeared recently or is forthcoming in HAD, Heavy Feather, Trampoline, Rawhead,  other journals. Jason lives on California's Central Coast with his husband. Find him on Instagram at @jasonwriteswords. 


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