farts

irish blood american heart

Somewhere in the peripheral vision of my family’s ancestry
is Ireland, green and stony and a reflection of its own seas:
prolific. Somewhere, in the back of my father’s father’s father’s
mind, the droning and incomprehensible sermon
of his motherland--somewhere, it left. It exited and left its crumbs
on the mat of the front door, and beckoned him to do the same.
My father’s father, I imagine, could see these same seas
that had haunted his own father for now uncountable decades.
They were ready--even he, as a small child on a boat travelling to
America--for change, that one-syllable absurdity that brings about
the worst in all people. My great-grandfather, feeling the boat’s
hideous breeze across his back, would have shouted at my
grandfather. He would have screamed and moaned and
shrieked of pure Irish torment until my grandfather’s young
tears dripped into the ruthless ocean. Perhaps this is why
my grandfather never once in his lifetime went on a boat
again. Perhaps this is why, in an act of youthful defiance that
never quite faded away, my father takes his own family, including
me, on a yearly fishing trip off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps
this is why I--once last summer and then again in a dream--saw
slick-scaled striped bass flop wildly into view and then quickly
disappear, covered by an oily film laid down
by the sun, into the cerulean sea.

on jeffery getting drunk for the first time

Jeffery was invited by a mutual friend
to a party the other day, whereupon arriving
he found that nearly everyone was already
passed out on beds and couches and--when all else
failed or was already taken--the floor. He stood
for a while and thought about driving home,
and then decided instead to stay and drink a discarded
bottle of vodka. It did not go down
easily. Yet Jeffery was able to withstand the
repulsive taste for long enough in order to
flop down on an L-shaped couch in the next
room and feel his face grow uncomfortably warm and
watch ten minutes or so of Out of Africa and say something
strange and irrelevant to no one in particular like Yeah
man I ****ing hate women
and then fall asleep.