The Fear Machine
When You Said Goodbye to Her
The fear machine stood in the corner of the theater
as we rehearsed our play.
It was covered in footsteps of different sizes.
It emitted the soft hum of an engine
still running after an accident.
Our two-person play had been written for us.
But the fear machine hummed in the corner
and “mango” came out like “mangled.”
“Why are you sad?” came out like
“Why are you causing these circles under my eyes?”
After a while we were each other’s serial killers.
“Admit it,” I said. “It’s mango.”
“You choke on it!” you mouthed.
Stage right, the fear machine hummed:
“Give me a hug. Give me a hug. Give me a hug. Give me a hug. Give me a hug.”
One day, the world didn’t end.
The next day, we had no philosophy.
A week later, our play was no good.
Two weeks later, it was streamed in high definition.
Fear machines bounced about the cinemas,
hitting the viewers.
We tried to laugh,
but our schadenfreude wasn’t convincing.
Thirty years later, we still keep our halves of
the fear machine, wishing they’d held together.
She was saying goodbye to him
She was saying goodbye to his ice cream
She was saying goodbye to his mistaken identities
She was saying goodbye to his hiking music
She was saying goodbye to his documentary scratching
She was saying goodbye to the view from his hidden window
She was saying goodbye to his ways of looking past her
She was saying goodbye to the death he was blending into
She was saying goodbye to his speakeasy animal rescue
She was saying goodbye to his rain and his misdemeanors
She was saying goodbye to his stunning voices
She was saying goodbye to his belligerent urban farming
She was saying goodbye to the rocks that looked like his face
She was saying goodbye to the mountains he would become
She was saying goodbye to their anticipatory wedding
She was saying goodbye to the old man of New Hampshire
She was saying goodbye to her cardboard boxes
She was saying goodbye to her masochistic nocturnes
She was saying goodbye to her disappearing perspective
She was saying goodbye to her rotting cargo
She was saying goodbye to his unacknowledged mountain flowers
She was saying goodbye to their newsworthy snow angels
She was saying goodbye to his clarinet uniform
She was saying goodbye to her ferry rides
She was saying goodbye to the pedestal he had jumped from
She was saying goodbye to his ways of calling her princess
She was saying goodbye to his not-very-good grin
She was saying goodbye to her readjustments
She was saying goodbye to his disappearances
She was saying goodbye to his encores
She was saying goodbye to missing him
She was saying goodbye to waking up to his face
She was saying goodbye to the freshwater lakes of his sentences
She was saying goodbye to the raccoons of his splendor
She was saying goodbye to her traction and her lack of self-knowledge
She was saying goodbye to their rollerblading
She was saying goodbye to his spirit sunk in the water
She was saying goodbye to his cinematic goldfinches
She was saying goodbye to her own flamenco knife-throwing
She was saying goodbye to her own inexpressible silence
Anton Yakovlev's latest poetry collection is Ordinary Impalers (Aldrich Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Hopkins Review, Prelude, Measure, and elsewhere. The Last Poet of the Village, a book of translations of poetry by Sergei Esenin, is forthcoming from Sensitive Skin Books.
