Saugus Iron Works
Tom Snarsky
Thinking of all the good things
you couldâve done but didnât
or—worse—could do but donât,
the world feels like a hand
extended to you in a dream, like
Godâs hand in that painting
only it has one of those joke-
shop buzzer things in the palm
and youâre weirdly sensitive
to those ever since the boy
you liked in elementary school
(you had no idea) got one
with his Scholastic Book Fair order
and got you with it after he snapped
the flip-phone calculator you got
with yours you thought was so cool
—he never seemed all that broken
-up about it either, and itâd take
you years to recognize that
indifference as a kind of fatal
attractor that would lead you down
dark corridors for most
of your early life, and it does
that even now when youâre not
looking or being your best
self, when your guard is
dead outside at his post and
youâre so drunk youâre smoking
cigarettes and the world feels
like the party in Morvern Callar
a procession of woozy images
where you hardly know anyone
except the man with the spotlight
and you only know him because
the comfort of abstract nakedness,
the thrill of showing strangers
fragments of your soul
like bits of shell on a beach
washing back and forth so
intently they almost seem to be
doing it on purpose, is a way
to know someone or a way to
understand yourself
when something as banal
as introspection fails,
and not fails as in fails a test
but rather the way a bank fails
to uphold the common good,
another in the long line of broken
calculators. Ariana Reines has
spoken of the pawn symbol (this:
)
as being an international glyph
for bad math (I paraphrase)
and itâs so frightening how much
devaluing happens to us
but also is a thing we do
to each other, and as I typed
âis aâ two lines ago
Autocorrect changed it to âUSAâ
being American as being
indefinite if youâre lucky.
My wedding ring says âour
checkered fortunes so luckyâ
(cf. Ashberyâs âInstead of Losingâ
as printed in Quick Question)
and Kristiâs ring says âour
checkered fortunes so prettyâ
(cf. Ashberyâs âInstead of Losingâ
as published at Poets.org).
This is an attempt
at the opposite of devaluing,
etching bits of poems into platinum
for love
Tom Snarsky is a math teacher who writes poetry. His book Light-Up Swan is forthcoming from Ornithopter Press.
