‘Care Instructions’, ‘Some Climbed, Some Vanished’ & ‘Earwigs and Earworms’
Photographer Joshua Zacherl is a small town kid who finds beauty in everything.
Care Instructions
You weren’t explicit. “Just leave me
By the side of the road.” This wasn’t
A request to drop you at a store
To buy another chianti jug
Or a house to visit friends. No.
Avoidable voices rose
From bottles of trauma.
From the couch, where I sat,
Not yet a driver, just fourteen
Or fifteen,
I had no map
Of where to take you.
Decades later,
driving Tucson’s
Sun bubbled streets, yelling
At steel haired elders
Or careening Californians,
As if they might hear my shouts,
I passed memorials for spirits:
Crosses, flowers, names,
And mementos.
A marker for your passage
May be what you meant, dad.
Instead of a headstone, it would be a billboard.
Ten foot lettering, taller than men, will read:
Here reside bones once held within
Olive drab flight suits on strafing runs
Above Vietnamese jungles.
I bet you thought you were funny.
This was a son’s lesson:
How a man handles a corpse.
Leave it beside asphalt, exhaust, and traffic
For the fungus and ants to dispose of it—
Which will be explicit enough for me.
The joke is on you.
Your ashes spent six years
In my closet
Until the women of the family
Asked for them.
They scattered you across summer-green
Lake water, near a waterfall
That looked like shards of spirits
Diving back to their source.
Except for one small portion,
I kept in an amulet, bedside,
not roadside.
Some Climbed, Some Vanished
In a windowless room,
Receiving no Vitamin D
From sunshine, no windy ion charge—
Electricity hums, but here
There’s no knowledge
About how illumination
Is created off-site.
Day and night are meaningless
Here. The climate preset—
Computerized. On screen
For a few minutes,
To save pixels and energy,
Before hibernating,
A black and white nature photograph,
the way some people believe
Truth emerges best.
A multi-gray snowstorm
muscles up to erode the
Saws and swords of mountains
Bleak enough to impale
Prometheus’s liver
Beyond the beaks of crows.
Someone climbed these peaks
To live fully, to fall,
To freeze in place, to vanish,
And some stared
into ragged winds with a lens.
A click, a pulse of batteries
Recording images of continents
Shoving stone upward.
I work five days and forty-five hours,
Seated where I cannot feel
The world I live within.
Tomorrow’s screen saver
Might show a feminine contour
in the shape of rivers
Dressed by the land.
I just want a window
I can open.
Earwigs and Earworms
This is the flotsam my brain wakes to this morning:
Pulchritude. This word lolls along
Strange synaptic currents,
Bobs unattached, undefined, which is
Vexing. Is the spelling with a C
Or CH? After a dawning dictionary check, I wonder
Why I woke beside an overblown synonym
For beauty, like a contraction of pulverized-
Christ-attitude. No man wanting to get laid
Tells his lady she’s a great pulchritude.
It’s a poet’s word, and not
The kind I want to be.
Most people have earworms, small
Measures of music repeating to a
Crescendo in our minds, while we wish
We knew the title or artist. But if you
Forget earworm and instead say earwig,
Which sounds like you glued
Hair to the tragus, that front flap
Of flesh on your outer ear,
I learned it’s an insect that burrows
Into your ear. I would think the horror
Was the worm not the wig.
Words, songs, names
Of old high school classmates
That flood and occupy mental
Space for a day.
Debris strained from
Perception’s flow.
Meaningless. Fool’s gold.
Shay Wills graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in English and Creative Writing. He, with his spouse and son, live in Tucson, Arizona, near his two older children. He earned his MS from Grand Canyon University, and now works as a mental health counselor. His poetry appears in The Abstract Elephant, Hive Journal, Wingless Dreamer, and Bookends Review among others.
