Jason Davidson

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Bouquet

The columbines burst from your mouth and I looked away. Here is your violet! Here is your pale
cream! Here are the twists that will bring you back to us. The good luck charms have been
packed away with the wallflower notes, the boat-ramps, the eros clamps. I stamped your ticket
like a big deal and hollered: Winner, winner, winner! We buried ourselves in the snow, in
Omaha. We looked into the sky. The sky did not look back at us. The sky looked away, as there
was nothing left to show. When I blow the bits of flesh and bone from the driveway, I am more
contemplative now. I recommend abortion pills. I crank out roadkill like it’s going out of style. I
wait awhile. Just a little while.

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Rarities of the Charged Heart Unknown

When we rode into town,
I was worried mostly about
the fact that they might find us out.
The townspeople were as wooden
as your best effigy, but unlike the last
of my truly apt guesses,
they had been renting out billboards
for years-
Pinocchio returns:
get your good wood here.
He is a stallion,
a ripe stud,
but I am no longer the
final thud that has to
sink to the bottom for
fear of being forgotten.
I am shanked.
I am loose like a salamander.
My oil always ends up
rising like yeast
to the surface of your
heavy, deadly thermometer.

You were glued to the bucket seat.
My body heaves- a late frost,
but there is nothing I can do to
remove you, unscrew you,
fuse you back together
in order to stop the misfiring.
Your sparks blind me
and I am so scared
of the smell of your electrical fire.
(Stop whining.)
(I’m sorry.)
I long to stop longing
and want to start in with the
part about fixing the fact that
I can’t fix anything fast enough.
It’s true.
I am made of antique plastic,
but when you bend and you bend
and you bend,
you discover that I break just the
same as if I were rubber.
But I don’t trust.
I do mourn.
Valentine me, or heat me up,
keep me covered, don’t ever
say lover ever again, lend me
only the things that were stolen,
disown me, conjoin me, shatter
me to keep me whole, bestow
me, outgrow me, use me to
fill up the holes that just keep
on flowing, loan me out just
so I’ll be lonely, leave me alone
and let me grow old.
I am so resolutely silent
that your voice is almost dozing.
I rarely believe
the things that I’m told.

We take the last room
at the last motel
before the two-lane
highway leaves this town forever.
There’s so much road-kill
covering the pavement that
I vomit until I am as dry as
pressed faeries, rarities of the
charged heart unknown.
everything here was once living:
rattlesnakes and armadillos,
mice and deer,
giraffes and tarantulas,
pegasus and rats.
I don’t even know what
part of the horrid country we’re in
or why everything that was once
breathing with a beating heart
is now smashed like a
fragile accident, like the
glory of guts when we
stop screaming and lay down
the hot hatchet long enough
to whisper, pink whisper:
Fuck it. I give up.

You lie on the bed, surrounded
by the body scraps of decades of
lost travelers: their bodies filled up
with the same fluids that fill you.
I pump you full of dull medication
and stare out the window at the
bright, bright billboard in the distance.
Pinocchio grins down at me-
naked, brittle, vaguely criminal.
I wonder briefly if I should have
just waited in the car

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Damage Back the Recovery

There was that time in Europe when I got kidnapped.
Slender men with smoky eyes and henhouse overcoats
grabbed me up like sustenance and did some funny stuff
to my private parts.

They damaged my bell tower. They poured velvet into my veins.
I was as much the same as the other son, the blunted one.
I nodded my head like an obedient child. I bloomed on cue.
I fooled around with Howdy Doody and blushed when the
rest of the humdingers pointed out the blood in my underwear.

Make me like you would make a paper doll.
I am no longer speaking in tongues,
I am stalling like the wall of that brute Berlin,
I am soggy as I stagnate, I am my own belated elegy:
my gift is gone.
I let go of my hands because I cannot fight the sandman.
I can’t ride around like this forever, I must move with the weather.
I am a red fool. I want to be as transparent as wax paper.
I am vehement because I am ready. Thanks for taking me out to the shed.
I am spraying cologne all over my balls
because I am a proper invalid in this, the City of Lovers.

I was everything but discovered.
I used their overcoats like blankets
and wore my clown mask like a soldier.
I dove deep into the middle of this undoing.

My autopsy yielded no blood and I was as stoic as his excuses.
The man with the monocle was stooping, he was leaning,
after he cleaned me up, he did it again. He did his best to violate my time clock.
Please wake me up once morning comes. Please smooth out my swollen creases.
Use your cheek like a Hallmark card, be patient with me, be as believable as peaches.
Please allow me home after the Holocaust, please trust me enough to trust you.
Please keep your hands around me, please remember to keep them where I can see them.

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Banner Art:
Photo by Sarah Estes, Unsplash, 2022