three poems

by Jacob Schepers

// Snippet #1

At the tail end
of the procedure and now
Doc calls me
over to ask
if I’d
like to see
them,
the little tunnels
just carved
out of me
and I say
sure
and he and I
gaze upon them
like Indy about to swap
the golden idol
with the bag
of sand before the big
ball rolls down
with intent
and vengeance.
Or like Pulp Fiction’s
briefcase MacGuffin
with the golden 
glow and spawning
endless theories
and parodies
and callbacks.
Or like when
Samuel L. Jackson, 
Dustin Hoffman,
and Sharon Stone
take turns secretly
seeping into the namesake
in Sphere around
the time that Queen
Latifah bites it
from the jellyfish 
attack that starts out
so cute and like little nibbles,
so fascinated was she
at their appearance
at the ocean floor’s bottom.
Or like—just kidding:
I’ll call it
there
and stick to comedy
with its take on
the Rule of Three
and christened thusly as
a comic triple
unless I’ve written
myself into a hole
here and this fourth
tangent is something
you’d call—
and quite rightly so—
the real punchline
in the anti-humor vein
that throbs and throbs
inside me: ok ok ok
so the doctor, he says,
“You know, some guys
even take a picture”
as if with a nudge and so
I obligatorily
pull out
my phone and focus
the camera function
on what was 
moments
ago 
inside me: ok ok ok
and the pale white
parasitic looking
ducts with just 
a pinch of pink
to ‘em from
the blood
in my scrotum
considered
the refuse, 
the detritus,
to the synthesis
and thus
expendable: I do
in fact
take a few shots.
I’m talking
myself down
from including visuals
as proof here. Pics
or it didn’t
happen, that treasured
golden rule
of our modern age. Sure,
it's got something to do
with generosity
without expectation
of reciprocity
but it’s also
got just a bit
to do with scandal,
with the meme-stock
phenomenon, the FOMO,
the getting away with it,
the in-joke,
the virality, the virality!
The vitality, the virility!
The horror, the horror!

// Snippet #2: A Montage

Let’s play it again. A rundown, 
a flurry. Beginning
of spring, a week in, and weak
in the knees, vacuous loins: now
three full months after
the procedure, my own
personal V-Day and in pops
the fleeting image
of Margaret Thatcher
trying to flash a sign
for peace or maybe victory
but ends up offending
the whole nation
with the crudest
symbol of genitalia. Anyways,
forgive that intrusion and let
me tee this up. After the procedure
and not before performing
my due diligence and flushing
out any residual swimmers
twenty-plus times over, I gave myself
the all-clear go-ahead to pick
up a specimen collection cup. Alas,
April comes and goes, 
life goes on
living and I don’t
have a chance to run over
to the lab for my drop-off. All
that month the sterile bag
lay unopened and untouched. I can’t
say the same. Set on my nightstand,
it haunted, it taunted, and,
with classic post-
nut clarity, I viewed it as my own
“Tell-Tale Heart” until I couldn’t
bear it: I can’t believe it’s not
better, that sometimes baby-
butter, or is it
batter? Best
move on, even I rolled
my eyes at that, so when
May’s flowers sprang
into action after
its unseasonably dry 
predecessor, I reached out
to Labcorp because of course
it's named that to protect
any shred of privacy
and decency and decorum and pomp
such as we’re wont 
to cling to.
The disembodied voice
on the other end of the line
just says to drop off 
the sample during business
hours so long as it’s within
the actual hour
of production. Translation:
it's showtime. Third of the month,
delivered cup, sure felt sheepish
handing it over to the employee
who was clothed straight
outta E.T. but even with her
mask on I could make out
a certain glimmer, a knowing
rise of the cheeks
into a half-stifled grin. Got told
results might take a week. Got them
back the next day with admirable
simplicity. Sterile, with two data sets:
no motile sperm detected,
no nonmotile sperm detected. Easy-
peasy and a little like pie.

// Snippet #3
 

Good golly

gosh do I love
it when a film
still from beyond
the pale pops
in this noggin
except sometimes
when that still
is something
else, something
monstrous like
the devil spliced
into shots
of The Exorcist
or something
pompous like
the shot 
of the droogs
from Clockwork
in the milkbar
in that slow zoom
out, or something
bombastic as in
Taymor’s Titus
when Lavinia swoops
down on
the camera and exposes
her tongueless mouth
that blood-filled mouth
to shriek at us.
Anyways I’m sleeping
as I can on the couch
and have been,
preposterous
as I am,
and experience what people
like me know as
“using dreams”
which are worse
than any still,
than any nightmare,
and more monstrous
than any horror
because they’re just
these libidinous
id-driven drip-drivels.
I mention this
to my therapist
who tells me anytime
a patient doesn’t mention
these Orphic calamities
she knows they’re still
drinking or drugging.
So that’s something
I suppose that shakes
me from my funk,
my spiral,
and here I see
a little arc,
a mental trace,
a little arc I track
as if it were something
spilling out
a blood trail
on an early fall’s
leaf-flecked field awash in
virgin snow.

Photo of Jacob Schepers

BIO: Jacob Schepers is a poet and the author of the collection A Bundle of Careful Compromises (Outriders Poetry Project, 2014), the chapbook Connections & Choreography (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and the micro-chap Shipwreck Abstracted (Ghost City Press, 2024). His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as antiphony, Psaltery & Lyre, Dialogist, The Greensboro Review, Harpur Palate, Heavy Feather Review and Hobart. He is an editor of ballast, and lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife and four sons.