Five Poems by Jon Wesick

 

Another Asshole with a Chapbook

 

He spent years

wringing life’s joy and pain onto paper,

reading to the accompaniment of an expresso machine,

while small-press journals rejected his poems.

Now he’s joined the flood

of those who haul boxes to coffee shops,

hustling self-published booklets

and trying to break even.

“Just what the world needs,” the crowd thinks,

“another asshole with a chapbook.”

 

True – just what the world needs

 

 

The Great Wall at Badaling

 

This grey stone dragon rides the mountains

of northern China for thousands of miles.

I tread carefully on the steep walkway,

its stones slick with drizzle.

 

Our guide tells of a woman

whose husband never returned

after being drafted to build the wall.

She searched China and agreed

to become the emperor’s concubine,

if he would find her spouse.

The emperor learned he’d died

and the woman killed herself

after completing her service.

 

My Chinese lover sang in Mandarin

on a warm, Southern California day.

“It’s about parents selling their children

during a famine,” she explained.

 

Such a landscape

Such heartache

 

Lisa Asked Me

 

to get her a Jizo statue

after I said Japanese dedicated

them after abortions.

 

Sojiji sells the best.

 

My gift.

 

She let me stay at her place

after I got evicted. 

Jizo in the room

smiling at me

Null and Valid

 

A null result is a valid result.

Images orbit the Frenchman:

baby Jesus, Mayan petroglyphs, Kandinsky,

perverts staring at the Statue of Liberty’s crown,

the woman dressed only in evening gloves

and close like Mercury.

Her perihelion precesses

in evidence of curved spacetime.

 

A null result is a valid result.

 

Pelicans Patrol the Sky

 

with their chests puffed proud in yellow tank tops.

Squirrels and seagulls bum spare change from passersby.

Pit bulls play mumbly peg

while their owners rest on concrete benches.

Crows smoke cigarettes in the trees.

A rattlesnake in shades and SPF 15

suns himself on a deserted stretch of road.

At dusk a porcupine on top of a street lamp

and signals all clear in semaphore.

Raccoons look both ways

then return to the ally to play craps.

 

 

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, I-70 Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Lowestoft Chronicle, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Underside Stories. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com