Jeff Whitney

“Give Him His Glasses, He Can’t See Without His Glasses”

In God Class we made two lists: Reasons People Should
and Reasons They Shouldn’t. It was a good start, but aren’t there also reasons
people do, reasons people don’t? Anyway, I left God
Class more or less the same just my hat fit differently filled
as I was with dread and longing, the peanut butter and jelly
of the godly. Time passed. For a while I worked on an ADHD study,
making lists of emotions participants felt watching scenes from
the saddest film of my childhood. I watched as they watched
different categories of moment—two children riding bikes, having
a first kiss—and maybe you know the details of the sad scene already—
the bees, the dead child—if you recognize the title. So God can also say Farewell,
the pterodactyl. Hello, humming strange. There are two scientists we each have
descending in a submarine barely bigger than their bodies,
weightless as Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky
before bees came and ruined everything. Here are two more
lists: Things I Lost and Things I Kept The Day I Left Home.
I spent hours looking for a thing I won’t name my brother
gave me. Instead I found Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, three frogs
in a field, named because I couldn’t remember the names of
the three musketeers, the three amigos, the Ninja Turtles excluding
Donatello, my brother’s least favorite, because already the world was splitting
into too many lists. Now we’re on other sides of god’s eyeball
and I’m here wondering how we get where we’re going, and if
it’s enough, throwing my blue ball against a wall like a god
with no mother, or mother with no god, another thing
there is no alphabet for, each passing cloud an animal
to say bye to. Three frogs at the periphery of my history.
They could be anything. Death, say, or death in the Tarot sense,
which is change. Which, yes, is also death. They’re joined
by all the others who’ve left. The woman I loved but couldn’t tell.
That stranger in Spain who approached and said he’d take me
to heaven. Heaven! How did I say no? He said, friend,
I give to you a grand opportunity.

Jeff Whitney’s most recent chapbook is Sixteen Stories (Flume Press, 2022). Recent poems can be found or found soon in The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch. He lives with his wife in Portland.