Paul Juhasz 

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Unrequited
 
The carnival was in town three months before anyone noticed. By then, the bearded lady was on a first-name basis with Alice, the cashier at Albertson’s; every few days she wandered the aisles, occasionally fingering the razors, dreaming of Barbasol escape. The lion-tamers released their charges with hollow hopes that they would opt to remain, the certainty of a daily raw steak better than shadowy dreams of gazelle (which just goes to show you that lion-tamers can only dance on surfaces), while behind their hands, the ride-operators laugh at such foolish religion. 
 
The trapeze artists were all out mailing letters, and the acrobats had long since given up. Those not enfolded into Kansas poems offered only half-hearted exhibitions, barely more than performative calisthenics, in front of an audience of peanut vendors and ride mechanics. The midway barkers found all of this disappointing, but hardly surprising. In a world where everyone wears a top hat, how to tell who from who? Regrettable, certainly, but even the novelty of tractor-pulls cannot compete with monster truck rallies in community coliseums. The jugglers took it hard, though. Assumed the blame, pushed themselves past the mundane predictability of round, tried triangles and progressively harder shapes, stigmatizing themselves needlessly. 
 
As weeks turned into months and months into years, wind-flapping tents morphed into buildings until it was unclear where the carnival existed and such things ceased to matter. 
 
And the single young child who saw the carnival as it pulled up all those uncountable unrequited days ago was no longer certain of what he saw.
 
**
 
The Old Men at Walmart
 
It is not the witching hour, nor anything akin to that, for there is no magic here. Still, there is something solemn about these early Saturday hours; an indifferent gathering, like a storm drain assemblage, when the single old men do their shopping away from the glares and stares, from the wonderous judgment of community. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, while silently assembling a paltry pile of items. Barely enough to justify a cart, but pride still keeps them away from the finality of baskets. There are no children, begging for candy or toys, at this hour. No wives or partners parsing through future-laden lists and dinner plan promises. There are just the old men.
 
They do not buy much for they have lost most of it already. They wander down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this, wondering whether they should count out their days in microwave burritos or in pot pies. The hardware section nothing but a vague, shadowy echo of days as distant as the Cretaceous, as mythologized as Valhalla. The clothes section sped through, a forced and fated indifference grabbing for shelves (for it no longer matters whether boxers or briefs). Some stay outside, huddled in the lea of the storefront, furtively smoking in passive suicide, but most shuffle, fatigued and silent, within; wandering down their lonely aisles, wondering how it came to this.
 
**
 
Shaggy Dog
 
The comic has learned something funny. He has long been a fan, a fluent practitioner of the shaggy dog joke. He may, in fact, be a maestro, for he once told one that lasted 35 minutes and at no point during the telling was the attention of his audience anything other than spellbound. A style of joke that expands and contracts time, that meanders in the telling, doubling-back on itself, finding dead ends. In fact, in some tellings it is all dead ends. There are no blueprints, no codified rules, no two tellings are ever the same. A joke that is all about the journey, a joke to which we already know the punchline (even if we don’t), and which we always find, somehow—and sometimes delightfully—disappointing.
 
Those are the jokes the comic liked best to tell. He had one about a stuttering salesman, one about a moth visiting a podiatrist, one that ends with the punchline, “I’d love to tell you, but you’re not a monk.” 
 
But now, he has learned something funny. Since he has let his hair grow long, longer than he ever imagined (except that damn bald spot. Nothing seems to cover that damned bald spot, stubbornly claiming its small patch of scalp since the mid-90s—and since the comic hopes his work will remain long—longer even that his hair—after he has gone, he should emphasize he means the 1990s), he finds hair, long hair, all over his apartment. He finds it gathered in floor-corners, in tub drains and sinks; he finds it stubbornly clinging to his purple couch. It is everywhere. At first, he blamed his dog, but then remembered he does not have a dog. And that’s when he learned something funny. He is the dog. A shaggy one. The comic, at long last, has become the kind of joke he likes to tell. A blending that makes him smile, re-focusing his attention where he has always known (but never suspected) it needed to be.
 
**
 
Talisman
 
I have a talisman. I carry it in my pocket. It was given to me last year by a blind man, for what he called “my kindness,” which was nothing more than an Uber ride home, because I thought the early dark of December relevant. He described the tree in his front yard with such precision, such memorized detail, I had no need to strain for the house number, flaked in faded paint on the curb. For this, he gave me the talisman. A large bronze-coloured coin, eagle on one side, thumb worn human form draped in a flowing gown on the other. “It has no monetary value,” the blind man told me, “but it will bring you good luck.” 
 
I’ve carried it in my pocket for almost a full year now. In that span of time, I have found, instead of fame and wealth, unemployment. I am still single (although my ex-wife is not). My hair greys at the temple and chin, my body wakes with aches of age. I often think of driving to Lake Hefner and tossing my talisman far into its ochre depths. But then I remember that my car has a flat tire and the registration has expired. And I’d probably throw out my shoulder. I wish the blind man had just given me cash.
 
I’ve carried it in my pocket for almost a full year now. In that span of time, no drunk drivers have T-boned me on their blurred and slurred way home; there have been no in-home invasions, no TVs stuck on FoxNews, I have not found my way into new toxic relationships or haphazardly-designed corn mazes. I have not been crushed by a tree limb, by trickle-down-economics or by a two-ton heavy thing. I have not been mauled by a bear, or a tiger, or a glyptodont. I have not been diagnosed with cancer or (if cancer seems overly-dramatic) with syphilis. The roof does not leak. I have not been arrested. I have not vomited. The house plant a friend gave me as an apartment-warming present is—miraculously—still alive. 
 
I have a talisman. I carry it in my pocket. It has no monetary value. On the rare occasions that I forget it on my nightstand, I feel naked and unbalanced, for I have grown accustomed to its weight.
 
**

This poem first appeared in the author's collection, The Inner Life of Comics (Turning Plow Press, 2022).

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End of Days
 
I have my doubts about the necessity of graves. Of what use, these carved voids in earth, to be filled with the need of others, this perfunctory obeisance we pay to traditions as empty as the moldy funeral suit within? Much better to welcome Death as something other than an address or a sterile stone monument. Perhaps not as a friend, but as an understanding, which is, of course, a kind of friendship. What more, at the end of days, could we wish for?
 
The world seems cold and fragmented, and I, untethered, see no reason to long linger, sleepwalking into old age, toward this expectation of a geometry in dirt. There is no point in lying underneath a gravestone no one comes to visit. There are far better ways to fill these end of days. Stay five, maybe ten, more years, filling this span with what has long been calling. Some landscapes will be haunted by sons and lovers. Sometimes I will embrace them; sometimes wave them away like morning mist over Crater Lake, or smoldering embers on a Yellowstone hill.
 
No abandoned nursing home, no encircled rectangle. When the end of days are reached, I think I will just fade away, like Tolkien’s elves. Perhaps years from now, readers of my words will wonder what became of me, as they do of Ambrose Bierce. But since Death is a construct for the living, that will be their own affair.
 
**
 
Gestalt
 
Pebbled mosaic litter the floors of tollbooths masquerading as catacombs. Sticky cinema floors fetishize the flight of rumoured birds. Deciduous gales rape street corners and marketplaces while mittens recall devoured fingers that haunt. Tides sharpen stained-glass saints, their reflective madness made glorious, grouped gazes spiralling toward this near-perfect truth: in lorazepam dreams, it is the ox that is not welcome. Junior varsity demons schedule professional-development classes, asking their sensei, “Is this quicksand?” On the mountain-tops, where the gilded gherkin-men live, bubble-wrapped scraps whisper of conch shells. Derelict Atari consoles dream of Wimbletons and percussion caps, red mist and manifestos. Meanwhile, in a corner where a howling silence demands to be made whole, brain-weary and headached children struggle to recall generational maxims. The world, voluptuously-gangrenous, built on the notion that, no matter the heuristic and in complete disregard of ordinals, the snail is always at home.
 
**

This poem first appeared in the author's collection, Ronin: Mostly Prose Poems (Fine Dog Press, 2021).

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Paul Juhasz is a Pushcart nominated author of five books: Fulfillment: Diary of a Warehouse Picker, a mock journal chronicling his seven-month term as a Picker at an Amazon Fulfillment Center; As If Place Matters, a collection of short fiction; and three collections of poetry: Ronin: Mostly Prose Poems, a finalist for the 2022 Oklahoma Book Award, The Inner Life of Comics, and The Fires of Heraclitus. A graduate of the Red Earth M.F.A., he has been serving as curator and coordinator of the Woody Guthrie Poets since 2020. He currently lives in Oklahoma City.