The Joy Menu

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“Hey boychik,” the refined voice on the other side of the world says. “How’s school? How’s soccer? How’s the cello?”
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Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from…
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That was the drug, I think. That liminality, that escape, that floating, etherial disconnection — or re-connection. I wonder: how many lives did he live…
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Tears, too, like any precipitation, find their way out of one sea and into another. It all gets washed away.
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This is a memory. But it is also a thousand memories. It can be repeated so many times, only the fruit changes, the game we play, the location where we…
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Somewhere, a dog barks. Another responds. Chickens, twenty yards to the right, shake and pluck and cluck in their open pen. Or maybe I’ve just added…
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If he had lived a fabulously long life, my grandfather would have turned 95 fifteen days later.
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But there is also a masculinity of fear. There is also a masculinity of curdled intimacy.
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My beloved, horrendous asthma—granting me access to him, to his attention, to his tenderness, his softest love.
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Maybe it’s here that I attach mythology to his life as an artist — a counterpoint to this tension, to this heaviness, to the darkness which blows in…
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This energy: contemplation, concentration, creation. Yesterday, your tender touch. Today, these words which reach out like fingertips and offer another…
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As we made our (slow) way into the countryside, I marveled at his fragility and tried not to let fear of it harden in my belly.
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© 2022 Joey Rubin
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