Pathetic

The shower chair,
one leg bandaged,
buckled.
My cousin had gotten fat, wasn’t supposed
to shower alone
between care shifts
but did and drowned. A fisherman,
he wanted to die
at sea, an ocean
can be inches deep.

Wind sanded his voice, he had a beard
of scales,
he was silver,
he died in moonlight, died in sunlight,
his sail a startling white.

A week after I buried my dad I dreamt
of his penis—
I’m sorry
to change men
so suddenly
but one death opens
to another—
I’d seen the small bird between changings,
it was hard
in the dream.
Sex is to death
the therapist
we went to for our marriage assured me
as tubers are to winter.

A holy one facing
a blank wall
is not waiting
for a better wall.
Have I wasted
our lives
neither leaving you

nor fully staying?
But fully is the wrong word for any
human endeavor our therapist might
have assured me.

Let’s hoist pathetic on our shoulders
and parade it
through the streets. Parade my
father, and us, and parade my
cousin who
if he called out
in the end no one
was there to hear him.

Jacqueline Berger’s fifth book of poetry, Left at the Ruin, was published in 2024 by Terrapin Books.Her previous books include The Day You Miss Your Exit, Broadstone Books; The Gift That Arrives Broken, winner of the Autumn House Poetry Prize; Things That Burn, winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize, University of Utah Press, and The Mythologies of Danger, winner of the Bluestem Award and the Bay Area Book Awards Poetry Prize. Several of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’sWriters Almanac as well as in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Iowa Review, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Carnegie Mellon Press, Old Dominion Review, Rhino, River Styx, Rattle, and Nimrod. She is a professor emerita at Notre Dame de Namur University, Belmont, California.