Poetry by Joshua Zeitler
I Love My Fantasy So Much I Close My Eyes
and Follow Behind It on All Fours
—from a line by Traci Brimhall
I need you like an astronaut needs the moon. Like an ocean needs the moon. Like the moon needs the moon. Like the moon needs poetry, you need me. I lose hours to my need faster than I can earn them.
I am in thrall to the lives of geniuses—the debts, the depressions, the delusions, the days wasted away into years. John Clare escaped an Essex asylum, walking the 80 miles home to Northborough in four days. He lived there five months before being recommitted, convinced his dead childhood sweetheart was his wife. Pride’s power’s not worth a roasted onion, he once wrote.
I was so in love with you, I shaved my eyebrows. I thought I had to be naked to be loved back. I was drunk on Kamchatka, straight from the handle’s parted lips. I thought nakedness began and ended in the eye of the eye, but I couldn’t unthread it with the razor.
In Leviathan, Hobbes cautions that alcohol can stoke insanity, for the variety of behaviour in men that have drank too much, is the same as that of Mad-men: some of them Raging, others Loving, others Laughing, all extravagantly... Passions unguided, he concludes, are for the most part meere Madnesse. His logic sane as gravity.
I want to hang an e on the end of every word, soft and silent, pleading, forgiving. I want to curl up in the curved shelter of it. I want to forget the need to say anything, to pluck it out of my pupil and cup it on my tongue. The sentences I owe settled, relieved.
In the first season of The White Lotus, Tanya McQuoid is about to sleep with Greg Hunt for a second time when her insecurity, oceanic, surges the shores of her grief. She thrusts the gilt box of her mother’s ashes into his hands. This is it, she cries, this is the core of the onion, demanding he dispose of them, that he leave, take her suffering with him and never come back. No, he says. I still wanna fuck you.
We are together until you leave me, but I win you back. I sit at the slot machine, obstinately jerking the lever. Its eyes spin so wildly, I cannot look at them. Its open mouth, onion-breathed, spits rusted obols stamped with the faces of our future children. You never crawl out of the machine, but I crawl in even as the moon tries to pull me away.
Transition Diary VIII
It’s just I’ve come to think of you like a son.
Brain bucket on the bar leathers sheathing him
like a chestnut hull. Read him what I’d written
to baffle his boozy exhaust. Wow an honest
to God poet! Asked him to remind me his name.
He flashes four blurry letters tattooed on his knuckles
shakes his fist like he’s grabbing something real
between us. Misread him for comic effect
and he loves me like a son. You know
I used to be in a band. He lays it down. My daughter
won’t talk to me. Leans in close. I don’t get it
the appeal why you would need to ruin God’s
handiwork. His lusty wonder sparks around us
singes my cager husk. He leaves like a father
stumbling backward pointing I want you to stay
a man! Bound for the next dive. My poet! My boy!
Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary writer based in rural Michigan. They are the author of the chapbook Bliss Road, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Foglifter, Diode, Shō, Nimrod, and elsewhere.
Arcturus 