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Another Essay On Man
I look to men descending escalators as I pass ascending though I know we’re headed for the same lot – to their shoulders, bridges braced by pylons sunken into pockets, strained with shopping bags or angled to accept a toddler’s fingers. Look to men downstream on rocks with rebound women, stealing slugs off beer cans in the sun. To men in libraries discerning what the day might bring, their eyebrows my horizons’ furthest forests. I look left and right of men at lockers at the Y, and catalog their daily small complaints: bum knee, a son who’s changing majors, leaky roof and all these goddamn meetings. I profess to look at mirrors, check my phone for dates and times and women’s words, but sneak a glance at men in deep-fried bars before a wall of dancing screens, in clearance sections wading into lowland towns of plaid, men in the waiting room wondering what will be asked. I want to ask them how they came this way, how they got over, what to stomach, when to dig in heels. Who did they look to when the lines were drawn then scuffed with windblown sands, when the bottle was dry then smashed to glassy stars, who told them that the job was theirs to lose, to just look busy knowing where to go. Noah Kucij |
"He Sees Nothing in Me Astonished" by Maureen Alsop
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Noah Kucij lives in South Carolina. Recent work appears in Verse Daily, Slipstream, Storm Cellar, and Old School Record Review.
Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. Is the author of three poetry books, most recently Later, Knives & Trees. Her visual works have appeared at Journal of Compressed Arts, Drunken Boat, Superstition Review, and Otolith.
