Poetry: Selections from Aaron Sandberg

Hitting Hitler With My Car

Intentions aside,

            the Civic struck him hard.

Sure, I felt bad

            at first.

But after—

            seeing the imprint

of a mustached face

            smeared on my windshield

looking like mid-sneeze,

            I saw whom I had hit.

His tumbling into the ditch

            as I watched in rearview

is what I recall—

            then his rising

and shaking of fist,

            spit-screaming blame

over my acceleration

            and questionable crime.

A limping goose-step

            marches toward me still

though receding,

            if not dead,

along a mile marker

            closer than it appears.

Turbulent

Don’t dab my mustard-stained tie—

            it’s the only thing keeping us up,

my OCD drunkenly thinks

           when the altitude drop

flips my meal onto my chest,

            so I embank my meek courage

with mini-bottle booze, 

            palm plastic knife in my white-knuckled fist,

balter in the aisle on my lavatory walk

            in defiance of pleas to return to my seat

and fasten-belt dings in the chop,

            wipe the runny nose-bleed

from depressurized air,

            and dream the will to wrest

the throttle from this pilot

            of our barely-nubivagant plane,

and as a cursed mercy—

            novice as we both must be—

take aim at sheer cliffs for a final approach,

            which rose up as we whizzed our craft down

to fill the lacuna in our bones with its rock,

            bringing this damned flight down now.

A Carol, Redacted

Prepare ye for the first of three ghosts,

            I was told, so I did—

I hid it beneath a belt

           so when he took me to see scenes

where I appeared years before now,

            I held myself hostage

and asked not for grace

            but for something more simple like mercy,

untucked steel from my waist,

            and drew a knife to the neck

of the boy who was me

            so I could never be haunted

since I would never grow old

            to fuck it all up in the first place.

On Hugh Hefner Dumping a Casket of Sex Tapes into the Pacific Ocean

Kafka demanded it all burn

but Brod wouldn’t have it.

And now Franz can roll in his grave

with history’s cancelling dice.

Drowning is just as good as that

and better than things never lit.

Fall to the ocean’s floor

in a cement-lined box that won’t bob

like the head of a girl on her knees.

What an awful simile.

Lothario is a word I want to use here

for what it means

but more for how

it sounds.

Sometimes substance and surface

go hand in hand.

Sometimes a past and future

can’t swing.

Listen to him sing:

I killed us before

           I died.

Your secrets, sweeties,

           sea-safe with me—

our sin has yet to learn

            to swim.

Just be bunny          and wink—

we’ll sink

            to save

                       us all.

Aaron Sandberg has appeared in West Trade Review, Asimov’s, The Offing, Sporklet, perhappened mag, Lowestoft Chronicle, Abridged, Giallo, Right Hand Pointing, Monday Night, Unstamatic, and elsewhere. A Pushcart-nominated teacher, you can see him—if he doesn’t see you first—on Instagram.