one poem by Jake Hargrove

Michigan

Just then it passed by like a headache

or a bird or an evening of dull sadness

which more than anything is what it really was.

We sat in the sun in a triangle of pool chairs

that striped our backs like twined meat

and drank gin with lemons and ice and wore masks.

Will was a skeleton Marsha was a gorilla

I was an old old man. I told them the following:

When I was a kid a friend of mine moved away

to Michigan and the next time I heard from him

and asked how’s Michigan he told me he’d been hit

in the face by a baseball and that it hit him

so hard they had to stop practice and bring

An ambulance onto the field like you see

in the pros sometimes and that following this he received

a complex facial reconstruction surgery

that required them to slice across the top of his head

from ear to ear creating a half moon cut

of skin from which they pulled and worked his face

until it (to the best of their abilities) resembled

what he’d look like before and scar this left

was as you’d expect quite severe like a two foot long

worm wrapped over his head so they tattooed it flesh

colored to help blend it in with the rest of his head

and this was novel because my friend was too young

to get a tattoo in Michigan at the time but since

it was a doctor doing it and not a guy named Greg or Crud

it was okay which my friend found some joy

in bragging about and to be fair he deserved a little

joy and bragging after all of that.

I see said Marsha.

Michigan said Will.

Yeah I said Michigan.

No but listen I said to them. What I wanted to say

is isn’t it something that one day you can be heading to

baseball practice and then suddenly your face

is getting sliced off your head and reformed

and reshaped like an expensive loaf of bread?

Isn’t it something that a face can just change like that?

There are people you meet whose faces are made

of fog and they can disappear whenever Marsha said.

Yeah but what if they get hit by a baseball? Will asked.

I gave up. They were starting to annoy me.