Mark Henderson
A New Father
Imagine Herbert’s surprise when little
men, wet from the plumbing, came climbing out
his toilet to hug his feet and lower
legs like long-lost sons—some half-reptilian,
calling to mind the fabled, flushed baby
gator who lived to grow in the sewers;
some in rainbow patchworks of discarded
condoms; others in doll-cloth versions of
what he typically wore, bought at thrift shops.
He looked in the mirror, smudged with pimple-
burst, at his unshaved face and unruly
hair before swinging his dangling offspring
with each heavy step toward his computer
to scrub his browser’s recent history.
The Gods of Ash
I say nothing to them of the cigarette smoke
ever fingering its way through the big-enough
crack beneath my apartment’s only door, shaken
uneven in its frame by a step-ancestry
of former tenants.
They affront me doubly (from both sides of their door)
with their dragging existence—a twinned manifest
of Baudelaire’s Ennui: muffled curses quaking
the interior before they settle outside
to chain a fresh pack together, breathing cancer
and suicide into each other on the short stoop,
like incestuous siblings.
She doesn’t look like she eats much, he’s balding
prematurely. Sometimes I have to talk to them because
my little dog insists on running over to
say hello. They don’t bother with courtesies like
fanning the air or exhaling in the other
direction, so I hold my breath a lot. They smile—
mockingly or sadistically I’m not certain.
Ironically, maybe?
Everyone else in the complex responds to them
with a similarly veiled annoyance, perhaps
how the ancients would shelter vagabonds for fear
that they might be gods in disguise, who’d smite with fire
the whole of humanity at the first insult.
They don’t bother to even kick, let alone sweep,
away the ash that they leave on the stoop before
going back inside—the remnants of other, lost
worlds crushed and smeared on the footpath
of other, future descents.
