Jon Wesick

The Iron Curtain Never Does Housework

Couldn’t you, at least, have poured the Molotov cocktails? I’m sick of doing all the work around here. While I’m tending a hive of cagey bees, all you do is wall off East Germany, play with your rockets, and pick on that Solzhenitsyn boy. Lenin needs to go into the oven for two hours before the guests arrive and he hasn’t defrosted yet. You don’t know how much effort it takes to wax the politburo, polish the pirozhki, and iron the stroganoff. I’m making a list. From now on, I need you to mow the MiGs, sweep the Kalashnikov, and put the gulag on the curb Tuesday night. Why don’t you walk the solyanka for a change?

I’m frantic. George Kennan will park his steamroller on our doorstep any minute and Warsaw hasn’t packed. There are rings around the perestroika and just look at these drapes! Would it kill you to vacuum?

I Left the Toilet Seat Up at the Mammogram Clinic

My guidance counselor wouldn’t let me take shop.
“How about a vocabulary class instead?”
All those Greek and Latin roots
didn’t help me tap countersunk ¼”-20 threads
at the cyclotron lab.

Dad was a suitcase with a smoker’s cough
who taught me about restaurants and paperback novels
but not how to be tough and street smart.
Later, keyboards gnawed tendons from my wrists
exiling me from lifting weights, pushups,
and the world of men.

The cops and combat veterans at my dojo
value survival more than thumping their chests
so I hugged an x-ray machine
the size of a refrigerator because even
useless, male anatomy can get sick.
False alarm! The radiology tech was cool
and we joked about Seinfeld’s Manssiere episode.

I didn’t really leave the toilet seat up.

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, I-70 Review, Lowestoft Chronicle, Misfit Magazine, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, Pearl, Pirene’s Fountain, Slipstream, Space and Time, and Underside Stories. His most recent books are The Shaman in the Library and The Prague Deception. http://jonwesick.com