Gary Leising
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To Be Printed above the City’s Seal and Mayor’s Signature
Be it resolved that this day, this hour, this moment,
that the key to the city shall be presented—
along with its attendant rights, privileges, and duties
(yes, duties, and not entirely, though mostly,
ceremonial they be, you should be prepared
to complete them, and as such you ought
have undergone rudimentary weapons training
including but not limited to knowing safety procedures)—
for the purposes of honoring contributions
to local culture, education, businesses, as well as
the greater sense of what the Greeks would call
a “spirit of communitas” (though of course, the Greeks
would not say “spirit of”), to you, the one named below,
and let all who may want to enter or leave this city
through its official gates be directed to call on your person,
as you shall be stationed in the stone guardhouse,
and let both yourself and those visitors know
the key you possess, though forged of the finest
quality iron and similar to the locks, is entirely
ceremonial and will not grant access to any visitors,
no matter how beneficent they promise to be
or how violent they and the mob accompanying them appear.
Your first duty shall be to clean said guardhouse,
removing the corpse of its previous occupant,
which you may leave anywhere outside as ravens,
carrion-eating-rodents, and the occasional foraging wolf
are aplenty. Should you wish to commemorate
that occupant’s soul in some small, private, religious way,
note that his or her name is written above yours
on this piece of paper below this resolution,
but crossed out with a single line so that you can read it.
That name is the last of many crossed out,
and we are most firmly resolved that it shall
be the last to receive such treatment.
100% Guaranteed
to grow and give fruit were the seeds, so I put the tomatoes in a pot on my deck, watered and fed the plants from sproutling to blossom-bearing bush. I worried when the skin on stalk and stems became bumpy, massaged them between fingers daily, watered more gently, less water more often, then more water less often, and nothing worked. But the blossom petals fell away and small green fruit grew forth. Forth grew the green fruit, small, round globules, and then, all but one fell into the dirt. The one remaining globe grew legs, then arms, increased in size, then grew a head. Increased in size more and the head was split open by a mouth. It wailed until eye sockets sunk in its face, then eyes rounded their way out. Before July ended, it had learned a few words, could put together sentences. It still hung on the bush. On the hottest days it curled into the shade of the leaves. It skin reddened. “Fruit was guaranteed,” my wife said, “get your money back.” The nursery demanded a receipt and the plant. I couldn’t return him. “Pick him if you’re so attached,” she said. Would he survive picking? I called local colleges, their botanists laughed at me. Finally one (a bald man about to retire) said there was nothing he could do, he didn’t know this man-plant. We’d have to know if his stem still pumped something into his body, and he doubted the little man could survive an x-ray, and ultrasounds weren’t sensitive enough. As that summer ended I sat with the tomato-man every night. He’d try out his few words—water, moon, beetle—and I’d say, “Well done.” He stopped growing and his skin began to wrinkle. “It is time to pick me,” he said one day, then closed his eyes. I cradled his body in my palm, wondered if he could weep as I wept. I could see my wife in the kitchen, trying not to be seen watching me. Before I squeezed and yanked him from the plant, I smelled frying bacon.
Worth 5 ¢ at the NY Redemption Center
The girl behind the counter spits at the man with the bottles, “Don’t bring full bottles here, okay? Then I gotta uncap them all and dump them down the drain. When you find a full twelve pack, get yourself good and drunk before coming in for your nickels.” She takes the bottles anyway, knowing it’ll be slow before closing and she can dump the beer then, cursing him with every bit of bitter beer splashed on her shirt and pants. Next morning he’s back with one big forty-ounce bottle, Budweiser, full. She’s about to curse him when she realizes he didn’t say a word to her yesterday, despite her tirade. Everybody thinks they have the right to swear at her, since her whole job is sorting cans and bottles, counting up nickels for them, spending the day smelling spit-swill and backwash, stale beer and sticky-sweet soda smells that stay, even after baths. “At least dump it outside, out in back of the building,” she says. He shakes his head, turns the bottle so the label is away from her, taps the glass with his long fingernail. She can see something inside, something dangling on a rope, maybe, from the cap. Its dark shape is too large to have fit through the neck. She thinks of ships in bottles, the display of hundreds of them at a museum her grandfather used to take her to. She holds the bottle up to the light to see it better. A fetus, it’s a fetus. Why would someone do this, she wonders, thinking of her two children at her mother’s, probably watching whatever TV is on while she spends 8 hours a day counting and sorting. She pulls out her cell to call the police when she notices it move. It brings a hand to its face, then away, then scrunches up tightly, not moves it would make from the bottle being lifted and lowered, but purposeful. “I have to raise it, don’t I?” she asks the man, but he has vanished, though she did not see him leave. She tucks the bottle in her purse, hoping her boss doesn’t later review the surveillance footage—she was hired to replace someone who was stealing bottles and returning them to the center across town. She punches the number of her doctor into the cell to schedule an appointment. “I think I’m pregnant.” She rubs her belly. “Sort of.”
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Gary Leising is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Fastened to a Dying Animal, published by Pudding House Press and Temple of Bones from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Utica, New York, with his wife and two sons, where he is an associate professor of English at Utica College. His full-length collection, The Alp at the End of My Street, won the Brick Road Poetry Prize, and will be published in 2014.