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    Atrophy
    Atrophy
    Atrophy
    Ebook90 pages43 minutes

    Atrophy

    By Jackson Burgess

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    About this ebook

    Dive bars, gas stations, bedrooms, and snowfields comprise the setting as the speaker asks: What do we feel? What should we feel? Who gets to feel what?
    In his moving debut collection, Jackson Burgess examines heartbreak, depression, and empathy through a lens of rigorous introspection.
    Atrophy’s poems vary in location, mostly between Los Angeles and Iowa City, with reoccurring characters serving as touchstones, forming the book’s narrative. Much of the collection is about or directly addresses an ex-lover, Lily. In the wake of that failed relationship, Atrophy wrestles with loneliness, substance abuse, and dissociation, utilizing lists, letters, prose poems, and free verse.

    These poems celebrate the past while mourning it, armed with the advantage of retrospect. Prescription drugs, dog fights, dance parties, love letters, and ghosts—the world depicted is at times dark, at times humorous, but always human. Atrophy is vulnerable and cinematic, a series of manic meditations exploring what it means to love and be loved, to hurt and be hurt.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWrite Bloody Publishing
    Release dateSep 21, 2018
    ISBN9781949342062
    Atrophy
    Author

    Jackson Burgess

    Jackson Burgess is the author of Atrophy (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018) and the chapbook Pocket Full of Glass, winner of the 2014 Clockwise Competition (Tebot Bach, 2017). He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He has led workshops at the University of Iowa, Los Angeles Southwest College, and the St. Vincent de Paul Cardinal Manning Center on Skid Row. Jackson lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an editor and educator.

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      Book preview

      Atrophy - Jackson Burgess

      Author

      I.

      VAN GOGH

      after Richard Siken

      I take off my fingertips, send them in packing peanuts,

      and though you don’t want them, you toss them in the freezer

      just in case I want them back. I pull out my widow’s peak,

      inches of hair by now you’ve never seen, slap on a stamp,

      send it along. In the story I don’t tell anyone,

      my heart is a town—cottages, cobblestone, courtyard and all.

      You’re the butcher, carving lamb chops. Of course

      I’m the town drunk. 5am again and the lamps

      are sputtering to make way for day. Okay, I’m sorry

      I called you the butcher. What I’m getting at

      is have you ever seen a gas station

      that’s gone under, the nozzles draped in yellow tape,

      the green plastic screens dustswept? It’s no fun,

      like me landing in your hometown and calculating the odds

      of brushing shoulders in the terminal with someone

      whose shoulder you once brushed. So I take off my shoulder

      and Saran Wrap it up, tape a tight package to protect

      the dust you may recognize when you slice in

      with your cleaver, clear some space on the block.

      I’d rather not mention the nights I spent wailing barside

      with friends who were not really friends. The taps

      dripped what looked like sympathy and I’m ashamed to say

      I took them at their word. It’s been a long year

      of blood moons and mixology. Towels in the bass drum,

      handkerchiefed high hats. I’ve lost track

      of how far I’ve driven straight—if the world is round, I may

      have ripped right through. You can’t write through an absence,

      you only end up giving form to silhouette. But what’s wrong

      with being the butcher, anyway? Every town needs one.

      Say there’s been a deluge of roadkill and the meat

      is going to fester and boil. I had the idea

      that any good story needs an ending worthy of the sum

      of its miseries, but I can’t plot my way out of this one,

      Lily, I can’t even put on my fucking shirt. I’m sorry

      I dragged you back into all this. I’m sorry I made you watch.

      If it makes you feel better, I’ll be the butcher—

      seems fitting, all this smoky blood, these ligaments

      forming lines. I found Jakov against our palm tree in the front

      with a knife, and I took the knife away, so then it was mine.

      Couldn’t find the words to explain that he had it wrong,

      you don’t need a blade to take off your hands,

      you just need a pen and a heart full of townsfolk,

      starving, neglecting their herds because they can’t

      get out of bed, watching the last heifer rot in the sun,

      because the butcher’s gone missing, he’s lost

      in the terminal, making eyes at friends

      who are not friends, a whole lot of harmonicas,

      and the thing about the gas station

      is the pumps are still on, sour green blinks

      wandering the night, but nobody has the guts

      to cross the yellow line. I had the idea

      I could drink my way back into our bedroom,

      that same sagging mattress, our clothes scattered like snow,

      like fingertips in a freezer left open

      in case the butcher comes back.

      II.

      ELEGY

      We were the ones slow-dancing with streetlamps, fashioning gallows out of bottle and bone, we were singing from the tops of pines, the birds didn’t know what to make of us and our scramble toward the sky, we were building walls in the backyard and knocking them down the next morning, on the metro we were always swimming in pools of our own sweat, on midnight treks for smokes we caught rain on our tongues and carried it back home, we were cages of light barreling into the gutter, the only place we fit, our mating calls resembled quarters in a blender, our path was marked by the string of baffled dog catchers and gas station receipts, the candy in the freezer was not candy, the

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