Five Poems
From Telepresences
Teratophilematology
My Zoom therapist is tender under her Bill Clinton mask. Her retriever
tongues the plastic wrinkles like a sloppy car wash. She makes me choose
who tasted better: sexy Freddy Kruger or the Jägerbombed Leatherface
that slapped the bouncer. How many people touch you each day?
Did you know lipstick was invented to simulate a healthy vagina? I’m scared
to tell her that’s a myth and how often I have hidden behind false mimicry.
I tell her I’m too much my father and not enough my mother. She wants
to know if they still have a sex life, asks why I never let men kiss me
on the mouth. Let’s circle back to my parents. My pestle shivers in the mortar
as I crush cockroaches for carmine. Do you dine out on memory?
Do you hold old loves sacred like horror franchises? I fake bleed
their spit like corn syrup and I want none of them. I want all of them.
I don’t know how to love in daylight. She knows. Her retriever vomits
gummy worms. Do you ever blossom as the monster in your own story?
Ichthyology
The brown trout on the boat floor stares, as I fumble
new lovers. Tail slaps the wet boards, as if to say, ‘Bro, c’mon’.
I drop the fillet knife. My Zoom therapist tells me a gutted stomach
is an opportunity to bait something greater than ourselves,
then pats her golden retriever. She rations her indulgences.
His coat fondled—hay ready for baling. I want to shave him,
I don’t confess. But I see the way he looks at me. Shave him
dolphin slick, gift him to the river. Watch his paws web and flipper.
For the sake of my beloveds, would it kill me to be more adaptable?
Probably. I fantasise emptying myself behind the dinghy:
pimpling the seawater bloody. The trout is an opportunity
to feed those I feed on. I could have left when it got hard.
I could have left the offal of me somewhere else. I could have left
the scales on or worn them like a gown to a gala for chummed love.
Kinesiology
Zoom therapist asks if I’ve lost, gained, or retained weight
in the absence of love resolved. I tell her the new city blew up
my gym and filled the pool with undergraduates, slick with life,
metabolising in ways you never imagined. It’s hard to distract myself
in a water garden of pruned flesh when my form is larkspur
gone to seed. Zoom therapist preaches growth in strange places;
she touches her toes, evangelises the elasticity of serotonin pathways’
readiness to bear my neural load. I pinch my stomach, a soft toy
in a claw machine. I complete a thirty-day core challenge
in six hours then sleep for a month. I wake up intermittently to feel bad
and google muscle monitoring. I workshop myself, soliciting biofeedback.
I vow to hunt my body’s imbalances like blubber whales for train-oil.
Instead, I burn the candle at no ends most of the time—one end sometimes.
Her protein shake rattles—I lie, say I couldn’t change things if I wanted to.
Ecclesiology
My spectral Zoom therapist builds a church of dandelions in her backyard.
She insists she’s not a pagan, just into hobbies. She chooses her clergy carefully.
At night, she digs her knees into the soil and chews on a buttress. She asks me
if people ever find hints of god in the antipodes, or if we still mistake
his morning breath for wind. She tells me which grazing creatures
make the best disciples, as she strokes her golden retriever. I need her
to put me on a leash and keep me from huffing foreign fauna. I need
a big house and new love to fill it. She gives me permission to become
an object of worship. She permits me to indulge a congregation of admirers,
sycophants, anyone, willing to lend me a pulpit—somewhere to find
myself adored for a while. Zoom therapist cautions against grandiose designs.
Are you willing to love in the absence of reward? Do you keep your past
as stained glass decoration? Who are you building this life for?
No really—if not you, who? What will you do if they don’t come?
Thanatology
Ladybugs eat their freshly molted spawn with no care. What’s stopping
my parents from reingesting me? My Zoom therapist does not ask me
my fears, but I tell her anyway. The unnameable nothingness that follows
our present nameable nothingness, the biggest, after tungsten rods plunging
into my urethra. She tells me not to turn away potential sensation. But I can’t
get hard when a bus driver’s hand slick with bacon grease might slip, leaving me
pancaked on a lamppost, or when soil slips a chesty cough of legionnaires’
under the shadow of green tomatoes. These are others’ deaths, old deaths.
I need to find a new death in the garden, feed it manure, watch it stagger
on young roots like a baby horsed on tit whisky. The old deaths are tired, dead tired!
My Zoom therapist is silent. The old deaths mew a mossy yawn. I shut their eyes.
I don’t want to go the way of all the foxgloves and bastards. When it’s me I know
it’ll be farce: suffocated by a guy named Heimlich, World Peace Day massacre,
a jet ski on fire on water. But I hope it will be mine, even if I can’t call it mine.
Jordan Hamel is an Aotearoa writer and performer. He has an MFA from the University of Michigan. His debut poetry collection, Everyone Is Everyone Except You, was published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022 and by Broken Sleep in the UK in July 2024. He is also the co-editor of No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of Aotearoa climate change poetry from Auckland University Press (2022). He is the winner of the 2023 Sonora Review Poetry Contest and the 2023 New Writers Poetry Competition. Recent work can be found in POETRY, Electric Literature, Pleiades, American Literary Review, The Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere.