Paradisiacal Sushi (Zuihitsu) by John Repp
After thanking her too profusely for the meal of apples & sesame crackers, he smoked a ceremonial final bowl & blasted “Behind Blue Eyes” through the borrowed headphones & then came the outlandish question “Who’s The Who?” & then came trudging down slushy Atwood with JT after soft-boiled eggs & strawberry yogurt.
*
Believe me I want to tell you
happy things I want to tell you
the gingerbread soffit is so delicious I want to tell you
the orange sections didn’t dry out
in the icebox but how much more lonely
to have known love & watched your love suffer & die
& to have witnessed the suffering witness
find love again or think so yet soon be told
every day how inept & unsatisfactory everything
you are is I want to tell you
it all worked out in the end
*
Contempt, shame, bafflement, pride, love all mingled among the cold bottles of milk on the front stoop & the blind labor that conjured them.
*
I rubbed my elbows raw that one time fucking him. For what?
*
The cracked windshield & crumpled hood five hundred
more or less easy dollars fixed no, the geese
that refuse to migrate weren’t involved the errand
annoyed me no end, so it ended up not being done being forgotten
it was so extraneous
*
He nearly weeps to recall the first acid trip, that washed-clean suffusion of deep enthusiasm, a calm thrill to brush the tips of the grass blades across open palms, the girl who appeared & disappeared from his lap, the squirming, the breathing a little raggedly, the fuming cigar around which his right index finger curled, the bright ember in the crowded darkness, the scoured hunger at first light.
*
We painted bottles for the bottle tree & photographed ourselves
laughing beneath it & bought sushi for the epic drive home & stripped
right after shutting the louvered door of the room
we rented that got nice & frigid as we perched cross-legged
on the rollicking bed eating sushi & marveling at the stupendous
fact of such paradisiacal sushi so readily bought near the Sea Islands
John Repp is a poet and fiction writer living in Erie, Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020, published by Broadstone Books.