Four Poems by Jon Wesick

 

Abscissa

 

Meat2 orders a Reuben sandwich

the abscissa roiling with past participles and

transmission

fluid. Turbulence leaves

no lean-to

shelter nor do prescription bottles convey. Exposed           during the

winter months, my blue-haired dachshund. What is the? Fluorescent

light bulbs lamp socket do not fit.

Jedi master where is? Chicago-style

pizza New York Detroit Tables Underneath

the linden tree autobahns

Bahns, James Bahns Doctor No Shirt No Shoes No Service

a proctologist with a platinum finger

 

Bicycles in the salad dressing

room and the chinos too tight in the waste. So

much. Meanwhile error 404

stack overflow Cantor sets and infinite loops. The mathematician

wants to sing in a jazz band

of brothers

keeper of the royal

seal team six

of nine lives of the four father’s day

light savings time

is of the essence, gasoline for those who

don’t speak French

fries or coleslaw?

 

 

Arrogance

 

The other day as banter ricocheted

off the walls of our online meeting room,

a discussion of quantum mechanics and mysticism

brought me back to my grad-school class

taught by George Snow

whose hair was frosty as his surname.

 

I brought up Wigner’s friend, the classic thought experiment

that’s puzzled scientists and philosophers alike.

You, who’ve never seen the Schrodinger equation

or taken a physics class for that matter,

labelled me arrogant for suggesting

my decade of university study means I know more

about quantum mechanics than you.

 

Here are 50 textbooks, notes from 3000 lectures,

my diplomas, transcripts, and Ph.D. thesis, I said.

And here is an article in the Huffington Post, you replied.

 

Here are Hilbert spaces, differential equations,

and wavefunctions whose energy eigenvalues

match a hydrogen atom’s spectra.

 

Here are three cyclotron labs,

layouts of experiments, cross sections,

my peer-reviewed papers in Physical Review,

and calculations for treating cancer patients.

And here is Deepak Chopra, you said.

 

Since my twenty years of painstaking effort

mean less than your fifteen-minutes on the Internet,

let me offer a humble suggestion instead.

In today’s tidal wave of propaganda and mistrust,

scepticism is a good thing

but apply it to crackpots, too

 

I Love the Smell of COVID in the Morning

 

YouTube…Shit…I’m still stuck at home watching YouTube. Every time I think I’m gonna’ wake up able to go someplace other than the grocery store. When I went to the in-person reading after the first lockdown, it was worse. They were all coughing and sniffling, practically sitting on each other’s laps. I hardly spoke to anyone until I said, “I’m leaving.” When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think about was getting back to safety. I’m here for years now, waiting for a feature, getting warier. Every minute I stay in this room, I get warier. And every month the virus circulates in the UK and Africa, it mutates into another Greek letter. Each time I look around, the walls move in a little tighter.

 

I love the smell of COVID in the morning. You know, last time I thought it was safe, I hadn’t left home for twelve months. When they said the vaccine was enough, I walked over to Lisa’s Pizza. Didn’t find one of ‘em. Not one stinkin’ mask anywhere. The smell, you know that garlic-and-oregano smell. The whole street. Smelled like … normalcy. Someday this pandemic’s gonna end.

 

Unkle Stan’s Advice

 

This free-range wok is all natural, hand-forged from grass-fed iron ore in a woman-owned Bessemer converter in Wuhan, China. Serve with sides of cosines and quadratic equations. Mmm! Kind of makes your Geiger counter water. Doesn’t it?

 

After a visit to the shoe store, isn’t it time you painted that ark in the backyard? Those Nike sandals aren’t going to tie themselves. And while you’re at it, how about restocking the bomb shelter with pie tins and VHS tapes? When they drop the big one, trench coats and fedoras will  be in short supply so buy those deer antlers, oil rigs, and beaver tails while you still can.

 

How about that boy of yours? He’s been pestering you to take out the sodium-iodide defector for years. Maybe spend a little less time grooming fiberglass at the post office and feign a token interest in your tadpoles. After the Fed hikes lending rates, you’ll be glad you did.

 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. Jon is the author of the poetry collections Words of Power, Dances of Freedom and A Foreigner Wherever I Go as well as several novels and short story collections. His most recent novel is The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com