Jon Wesick

.

Google Earth

On a satellite image

I walk the streets of memory

wearing maroon, hopsack pants

and shoes that are never pointy enough.

The cold wind off Lake Michigan 

freezes my hair into icicles, the dampness 

from a shower after sixth-period gym,

but wearing a hat is never cool

despite my anxiety at the barber’s work.

I scroll the monitor

to follow the way home from junior high.

No matter what route I take,

whether circling Missy Bock’s house 

or crossing Maple at Lakespur,

by the time I arrive at our L-shaped home,

pass the white gate and plum tree,

and rush to the living room TV,

the eerie theme of Dark Shadows’ closing credits

is already playing  –  Do-woo-woo, woo-woo, 

woo-woo-woo-woo.

I fill a glass with psychedelic yellow Mountain Dew,

and snack on foil-wrapped, space-food sticks

(just like the astronauts eat).  Judy, my tri-color collie, 

stares with a Zen swordsman’s focus

and catches a tossed cheese curl with a snap of her jaws.

I follow the highway to Gary’s Drugstore

where I buy Mad Magazine, fifty-cent paperbacks,

and the plastic models I build in the basement 

on a table splattered with dried paint – Polaris submarines,

B-17s, Messerschmitt 109s, the James Bond spy car,

Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. For a few short hours

I am a demigod creating miniature worlds.

Fingers sticky with plastic cement I glue pieces together,

pack seams with filler, sand, and spray enamel until my eyes blur.

Staring at the computer image from space

I zoom the overhead view of my bedroom

where WLS radio plays me to sleep - The Box Tops, 

“Pictures of Matchstick Men,”

“Liar Liar” by the Castaways. 

I dream of finding some magic path

hidden in the familiar geography.

But this was before Martin’s and Bobby’s deaths,

before the riots at the 68 convention,

before the moon landing, before Kent State,

before I began sneaking out my window at night,

snapping juniper branches under foot, 

and roaming the shadowy streets

searching

Years later the magic path undiscovered

I want to return to the L-shaped house

and walk those streets again 

past Dead Man’s Creek, past the elementary school 

where I broke my wooden recorder in defiance, 

down the muddy path to the neighborhood with no sidewalks, 

right at the Y where Main Street splits off from 53, 

and under the railroad bridge that echoed terror 

when trains thundered overhead. 

You do not move though a city.

It moves in you.

DiL

I am the Myron E. Casey Endowed

Professor of Disappointment in Love (DiL). In keeping with my

duties, I teach a graduate seminar in

lingering resentment and publish

original research in the Journal of Bitter Divorce.

I came to my position after a

lifetime of scholarship. Never one

for mere academics I’ve always

favored a hands-on methodology. I

began field studies with unobtrusive

observation of my father’s

dissatisfaction and subsequent alcoholism. From there I moved on

to cohort studies of adolescent

rejection. College offered new

opportunities but despite access to a

wider pool of research subjects, my

cross-sectional study of sex as

panacea yielded null results. As an

assistant professor I earned tenure

with a series of participant studies

judging subjects against my

idealized images. Lately my

research has been limited to

theoretical efforts tracing the effects

of desperation and low self-esteem.

Convinced that knowing all the

ways love can fail is the only way

to avoid heartbreak, I always

encourage bright students to major

in DiL Unlike other academic disciplines the field is growing with

nearly limitless possibilities for study. And due to the strong overlap

with office politics, industry actively seeks DiL graduates.

Jon Wesick 

Jon Wesick is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Tales of the Talisman. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. http:// jonwesick.com

Jon Wesick

70 W River Dr #33

Manchester, NH 03104

USA

1-442-264-9951

[email protected]