two poems
by Zebulon Huset
Giving Up, Keeping On
The sombre saxophone song
that played over the documentary’s
grainy and blurry photographs
of the Warsaw ghetto—
bedraggled starving children,
dozens sleeping in a room,
a mangy dog all ribs, hobbling around
with its grey tongue dangling—
is the same song from a romantic comedy
that I saw twice in my senior year.
The sad, dramatic late night walk
that is the ‘deep’ part of the movie,
between the nut cracking baseball scene
and the pie smashing incident,
where the man thinks the woman hates him
due to a sad misunderstanding,
and he is contemplating giving up
his pursuit of a marriage with her.
And it reminds me of a walk I made
in San Diego’s Casa De Oro neighborhood
one starless, foggy late night,
contemplating giving up
west coast life, and moving
back home to Minneapolis
to be surrounded by family,
the warmth of blankets on a winter morning.
Maybe giving up more,
and the seeming ease.
I walked past bright signs,
the orange and green 7-11 burning the sky
like a holy man I have no interest in.
Down Conrad past taco shops and gas stations,
KFC, Subway, and the Purple Heart Thrift store
without a single car blinking its headlights
at me as it passed, nor a single pedestrian
to grab their purse as I walked by
with the black hood shadowing my face,
shadowed by doubt and confusion,
and I didn’t hear any crickets,
only the buzzing of neon,
and I didn’t taste the chlorophyll,
only the bitter emissions of fried fossil fuels,
and I walked my questioning all the way
to the end of its tether,
and looked back at my snail trail
lost in the fog, beacons of commercialism
lighting the way back home,
which was an apartment just past
the bridge over the 94,
like breadcrumbs to the present
I was walking away from,
trying to wade back into the pacific
memories that I knew weren’t so perfect,
that forgetfulness had airbrushed past recognition.
With my worries stretched,
I saw the light of Blockbuster Video’s sign
through them distinctly.
Every angle defined through the thinned
doubts of purpose and time.
A nostalgic montage seized me
despite myself and I stood
in the shadow of a jacaranda
that night in full black bloom
until I noticed the common thread
of learning to forge my own path
through the impositions of mockery
and tragedy as I took the crash course
in pursuing what I liked in life
but graduated with a degree
in not giving a fuck, so
I turned around, and
retraced my steps all the way back
to my cold bed, thin blanket,
to where I was, and I curled up
into the fetal position,
and slept soundly for a welcome change.
Before Being Promoted
Eric would eventually be promoted to drive-thru—
one of the few teenagers content to make a buck
and not fuck off frequently enough to be fired—but
preferred those first years, spinning the sour cream
gun like a six shooter with a self-dubbed cassette
of Holy Grail a constant chatter of dialogue
as he, head down, built his motherfucking tacos,
thousands of orders (one at a time aside from
dinner rush). Some management cast member
would pluck one headphone pad from his ear
and shout “SUPREME, NO T”! and he’d reply
“What is the air speed of an unladen Taco Supreme?”
They all left school like the burnout headbangers,
that rotating puppet show of managers, trying
to take themselves and their real store’s money
so seriously—a flash in the pan of life then
they snap—end up galloping after the set sun
two empty halves of coconut playing them off.
BIO: Zebulon Huset is a public high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and he received his MFA from the University of Washington where he was coordinating editor at The Seattle Review. His writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, North American Review, Smartish Pace, The Southern Review, Fence and many others.