Jason Davidson

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The Great Pool

The man wanted today to be different, so he waited in the great pool with his mouth wide open.
His left elbow itched and the fax machines spit out death threats like the old jungle regrets. I
have always been more of a bystander, the man thought. He stayed still in the great pool. A
woman fell out of the sky, landed in the pool and drowned. She was screaming: I don’t know how
to swim! The man wanted to say: I’m sorry, I don’t speak that language, but he wanted today to
be unlike yesterday, so he remained still in the great pool. The great pool said many words too,
and the man did not understand them either, so he stayed still. The man had forgotten to wear
underwear, so his chest and stomach and balls burned under the smug sun. The man had
forgotten to apply sunblock, so he shrugged without moving and thought: We were all stand-up
comedians, but now we’re treading water in real time. Time is a wristwatch. The man did not
own a watch. Time is a lie. Time is stop-motion choreography where all the players hate one
another and cannot wait to expire. The man’s mouth remained open until his gums were swollen,
heavy and fluent. They tasted of bubblegum. The man remembered a time when bubblegum was
like feeling and then he remembered that time was a lie. The man’s mouth remained open until a
wasp flew inside and rested there, cleaning her legs of dust and love atop the man’s tongue. Now
the man could never close his great mouth again, but he was glad to be quiet. He was glad to be
wrong about never having children. The rest of the man’s life still was not different.

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Primagravida

Venus did not want the baby, so she tried to teach him how to dance. The baby stared up at her,
with peach-pit eyes, mewing like a yam. Venus still did not want the baby, but she enjoyed yams.
She steamed the baby in her grandmother’s old depression glass bowl and sat down to enjoy a
good supper. The baby said: Let me dance for you, mother. The mother decided she would rather
dance than eat, as she was as trapped as an hourglass. She said: Dance for me baby, like a wild
stallion. The baby went to sleep and dreamt of pastel horses running through a frozen lake. One
was his forgotten father and he felt warm and safe. When he awakened, mother was using the 3-
D printer to create a series of husbands. The 3-D printer ran out of ink and there was no time left
to haze them. She whipped each of the husbands with licorice leaves. The husbands stopped their
leaking, they ran off with the latest parade. The baby was alone with Venus again and still, she
did not want him. Although she was illiterate, she demanded that the computer make some signs
for her. The signs read: A very good yam, only one available. Before someone arrived to buy the
baby, he turned as flat as a planet and slipped into the attic storm-drain. Venus smiled and ate a
salad. Tonight, she will hear the wild horses breathe their boiling breath at her front gate.
Tonight, she will spray her pink planetarium with pesticide. It will be painful, oh Lord, it will be
painful, but Mr. Ed will be in for a nice surprise.

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Banjo-Eyes

For Jesse

(After graduation, they loomed into each other like brisk magnets and agree to take a road trip
together, driving through the prehistoric forests of the Pacific Northwest. There are a few
interesting things to note about their experiences, recounted here for the grandchildren that they
will never have, a stand-alone volume documenting the fallen blossoms, the awesome
way he tilted like a windmill whenever he got head, but, still:

years later, he is dead in a small apartment overlooking
the ocean, his eyes open and surprised,
the child of a UFO sighting,

hardly then, instead, notes on their journey, primarily through Oregon:

one had to stand on tip-toes to kiss the other.
heels leaving like a eulogy, the Earth moved a bit each time.
fine wine, but not really.

they only fought twice, both times drunk
on cheap wine and the truth is that they
liked it because when two people who think
they are in love pretend to fight over nothing
it is like a sailboat caressed by bent waves
and when it’s done, they hold each other and
it feels nice to say I’m sorry.

he tells her that when he was in high school
he would visit an elderly neighbor to water her
ugly houseplants and trickle birdseed into the
cage of her parakeet, Banjo-Eyes. when the woman
was not looking he would take 20 dollars from her
purse and when she died there was no one at the service.
not even Banjo-Eyes.

she tells him that she did not love her high school
boyfriend, but he held her hand at the clinic
when they rinsed her. her eyes were dry,
but he could not stop crying.
she would have named the baby
Banjo-Eyes.

at a rest stop outside of Eugene,
they fuck in the bathroom because it is
unusually clean and very quiet.
after she’s climaxed, she holds him
and laughs uncontrollably,
like a price tag, and says she loves him.
he says that film school filled
her head with all sorts of nonsense
and cleans up a billion babies in the sink.

he thought for a moment,

I could literally kill her, out here in the wilderness,
break her neck with no pain, a small and scrappy sparrow.
leave her body behind the dumpsters, turn myself in a few days later.
I would be famous.
I will never make a movie, I will walk alone and people
will stare through me like ghost blood, an abandoned pirate ship.
this could do it. sign the confession,
“love forever, Banjo-Eyes.”

no murder that night or any another,
he simply didn’t have the stomach for it.
on the second to last night of the trip,
they almost collide with a large doe in the middle of the highway.
she hit her head on the dashboard when they stopped,
a small trickle of her leaking out, like the mouth of a river.
the doe laid down in the middle of the road before them,
she screamed and balked, she gave birth to a human baby.
they left before the highway patrol could ask them for a statement.
at the airport, he says he’ll call her, but it’s just the sort of thing
one says to keep the readers guessing.

the night he died, there, ocean-side,
he could not remember the girl’s name.
he thought, though, of the parakeet, and the fact that it stayed silent.)

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Banner Art:
Photo by Lorenzo Sardelli, Unsplash, 2025