HOCUS POCUS: Golden Shovel

After Jennifer Michael Hecht

When you were twelve, your shadow out cast mine, you’d eat
two bowls of long spiral spaghetti straws twirling in a

meaty sauce I scratched, red, lip-smacking, mmm. Wednesday nights, the donut
shop man is a dervish charmer filling our sack for three dollars for no rhyme

or reason. Once, in a recording studio you improvised a jazz opus
in “F” on your sax and called it Boston Cream. The CD lies on a shelf with

the summer scrapbook wherein you hooked bass in lotus
blooms from your kayak and released grip from the apex of the rope

swing, ooo. I do not know these lines yet, how your body glossed by sunlight is
carving ripples lit by the gloomy rays of the moon. In 2005, you said, Homework is a bogus

way to waste the day, so I’ll study at four A.M. as a hocus
stunt of genius to play Need For Speed after school – hocus-pocus

masking your stash of dark seeds deep in your solar plexus – hocus–
pocus – pitching no-hitters, stroking break points, keying Chopin – hocus-pocus.

Loss is vexing, shame is dispiriting, life is one thing then another. Please dare
to tell someone, if not me, anyone, eat a donut, blow an “F” not–

e, check your pulse on a smart watch, swipe the dark web off your screen, we need you to
be. Don’t close your eyes, there’s so much hope for your tomorrows. Don’t kill

yourself. Bake a cheesecake, hike the Long Trail, take a steam bath, aaa. Kill yourself
and hundreds of other people die. Smash a pumpkin. Smash a hundred. Please stay. I

will give full-sized candy bars to everyone who has figured this out about suicide. Won’t
you help me help you to not get spellbound by the circumstances of the present? I won’t either.

© 2023 Deborah Garcia, All rights reserved