They Send Me to the City to Stay with My Auntie
I hang my jacket in the hallway
her apartment is old
made from shoestring potatoes
it smells like a jelly factory.
Against the wall a man’s face
eyes folded
laces around his neck.
That’s your Uncle, dear.
He barred her
from doing much of anything
when he was around
then he died.
She asked the doctors
to keep his eyes and brain
alive and put them
in a fish tank.
That night when she got home
she put on a mambo record,
poured herself a vodka, lit a cigarette,
and blew smoke in his eyes.
The tank is down the hall
full of algae and bubbles.
She has it hidden
behind a curtain.
On the wall are photos
of President Gerald Ford,
our family on vacation,
and antique pictures of naked ladies.
How many naked ladies do have to look at
before I get something to eat? I ask.
I’ll think about it, she says.
Behind the curtain skirts are hung up,
sponges tied together,
a bag of teeth.
My Auntie takes a photo of me
so my parents will see
the child they raised,
buzz-cut, roadworthy.
My Auntie tells me stories
about my family,
takes me shopping,
for sweaters and sneakers.
When she gets excited
she makes the sound
of a happy seagull
and spins like a mooring buoy.
The Memory Machine
I’m thinking of making a down-payment. In the photo it’s like a big negative-ion generator. You hook it up like an E.E.G. machine with the stick-em sensors on your temples and a helmet like a hair dryer. It comes with a little printer and defaults to a setting they call Medium Memories—no dead dog or cousin Nancy’s died, more like the time you shot a paperclip at a cheerleader in the middle of a handspring and he buckled like origami. Or the time you tried to get Jimmy Locke’s sister Susie to join the Naked Club and she didn’t show up for the meeting. You see them on a screen like an old Mac Plus. A bearded mendicant will sit down with you to help you interpret, help you find proof you were right after all. You weren’t bad or immoral. Any hint you were at fault is deleted right there on the screen. Like that Albert Brooks movie with Rip Torn as his defense attorney where they show him video of his parents screaming at each other, he’s three, gripping the bars of his crib, crying. Or those times you felt everyone was an insensitive dork, everyone on the planet. You stand in a bus wondering why no one is looking at you, no one is smiling, you wonder why you are so pissed off, or more like you just notice it. Supposedly you can buy add-on music to enhance the viewing experience. You can pick swelling strings, or banging metal, or someone who sounds like Nina Simone who can match your mood and make you feel better.
Bill Ratner is a voice actor and author of poetry collections Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake (Slow Lightning Lit,) Fear of Fish (Alien Buddha Press,) To Decorate a Casket (Finishing Line Press,) Best of the Net Poetry Nominee 2023 (Lascaux Review,) and 9-time winner of the Moth StorySLAM. His writing appears in Best Small Fictions 2021 (Sonder Press,) Missouri Review (audio,) and other journals. He teaches Voiceovers for SAG-AFTRA Foundation and Media Awareness for Los Angeles Unified School District • billratner.com/author • @billratner
Featured image in this post is, “Babyphon Phonograph turntable” by Maksym Kozlenko, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
