Jason Tandon
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Jason Tandon is the author of two collections of poetry, Wee Hour Martyrdom and Give Over the Heckler and Everyone Gets Hurt, which won the St. Lawrence Book Award for a first collection from Black Lawrence Press. His poems have been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in many journals including the New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Columbia Poetry Review, and Poetry International. He is currently a Lecturer in Writing at Boston University.
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Klutz
First date
we take tea
at your place.
Chipped cups.
Krazy-glued saucers.
You tear a curtain down
to watch the snow
pattern evening a blank
in tangerine streetlight.
You play a Bartók dance
on violin, bow
the final note
and knock
the music stand over.
I send us to bed
without dinner or dessert.
Morning, you wipe
cold fog
from the pane,
sweeping off the sill
a wax stub of vanilla
we let burn all night.
A little dipper of moles
leaks down your shoulder,
and when you turn,
nose freckles
like spilled cinnamon
spread to the upper
reaches of your cheeks.
In you, already
my refuge, sweet,
my breakage.
originally appeared in Poet Lore
Monster
for a high school buddy killed in Iraq
I stand in the drainage field behind my house
that mounds into a small hill pinioned
with slender trees dropping weight for winter's regimen.
Their branches, bone-thin wings of angels.
I remember when we used to drink
on our old playground after dark
until the cops chased us away.
Beyond the hill, in the dun colored stalks
of dead cattails, a heavy thing drags through the leaves.
I yell. It doesn't scare. Is it the black bear
that made the neighbor's kid wet his pants
when he heard these young trunks snap?
I close my eyes. I've heard this sound before.
That wacko—pacing the gated bowels
of New York's Port Authority, newspaper
twined to his feet—muttering about pound cake.
He had made the best, sold thousands from his shop.
Who don't like pound cake? I don't. But he grabbed
a fistful of my shoulder, and I was taught always
to be terrified of those stranger than me.
originally appeared in the Red Cedar Review
Cancer
My bank makes an error
And I spend the day on hold
Dozing to a jazzy flute,
While my friend gathers his chickens
And plucks the last of his garden.
In his kitchen lit by a candle
And the open stove door
He cleans me out of nickels in five-card draw.
He watches my every sip of beer
As he gulps a blender full of swamp.
When radiation has singed
His last taste bud
He answers the call of the equator,
A barefoot place without banks—
My supper is again interrupted
By a man on the phone who speaks
As if he knows me
And sounds hurt I haven't called back,
Though I thought I'd made enough threats
To be taken off his list.
from Wee Hour Martyrdom (Sunnyoutside, 2008)
