Antosh Wojcik

Make an Exit

Sis, let’s call her M, comet of shout,
bags everything in her room,
napalms out, smokes the landing.
Dad, let’s keep it Dad, drunk
on fiasco, curses her abandoning.
As she splits, M threatens to torch
his sacred lawn so he finally learns
the cost of his worry. My worry,
gregarious and nomadic as his,
drives me after her score across the suburb.
We’re in the river, sis.
At the door of the crisis house,
M introduces me to her other family,
a swarm of sandy dudes with compound
eyes and small-talk-like clicks. These people
make her happy. I press the last
of the money into her hand,
knowing it will turn into tunnel hours.
I hug her, the smell of ash cloud absent
for a moment. On the walk home,
I sing in my first accent to get to Texas,
to the swingset we’d drop from,
training our bungee-muscle, the sun
grinding us down with its ancient thumb,
days so hot that falling
from the sky was all we could
do to cool down.

The Woose

no one thinks it was the first electrician
no one believes it was a flying woman
some say it was a gelatinous mud shark
some propose it was an orphaned wild man
no one knows it was a disaster
no one blames it for running away
some reckon it wears feather tights
some assume headlessness
no one depicts its slimy physicality
no one describes it as a feeling
some hypothesise it is the juice of the unripe plum
some realise it’s history oozing
no one senses they may be talking around the thing
no one differentiates a beast from a man
some appreciate the ambiguous being
some acknowledge the gender disruption
no one claims to have married it
no one declares their love for it
some allege its fingerprints
some reexamine the evidence
no one knows what the Woose is
some say the Woose named the Hill
everyone lives on Woosehill
everyone is the Woose on the Hill

Past Yard

So came the drought.
Dad asked me to imitate
rain in the backyard.
This was big.
Impersonating a shower,
I held my hands
above the dry patches
of grass. I thought
about all the rain
I had in my head
from being English.
Years and years
of it arriving on days
unexpected, mostly expected
but when it wasn’t wanted.
Soon, I got a dry mouth.
Parched, I went indoors.
Dad drained a lemon
into my mouth
then sent me back to the yard.
Rain came from my hands
but nothing landed on the grass.
I stayed there til dawn,
til bored. Come morning,
the yard had died.
There was a vague sense of loss
amid the patio slabs.
Dad fell to his knees on the dead
grass, shouting ‘why’ at a shroud
of locusts from the past.
They didn’t stop this time.