Summer Sonnet

We were in the middle of the summer
and we thought we’d never see the end
of it, the sticky warmth, the salt-slicked
bodies, the mosquito-buzz of constant
desire. My skin crawled with the heat
of pleasure as the advancing armies
of July and early August breached
my carapace of pallid skin. Surging
through flesh and marrow, overrunning
the last redoubt of uncertainty. But
flesh is only everywhere until it isn’t. I do
the best I can with what I’ve got. And who
will be my paladin? No one I know
is an expert. No one now living knows.

Desert Sonnet

How clumsy you are, I said, don’t you
even know how to stay murdered for good?
Not that I want to pressure you unduly.
I love you, truly. I see your bare neck
and naked belly, your thin wrist and tapered
ankle. I see the jeweled pins in your hair.
This is proof of life, the disfigured
sons of the rich rejoice. I, on the other
hand, mortgaged my home to get my upfront
money and leave forever, because here
the air smells bad and you can’t drink
the water. You can’t drink what you don’t have.
I felt the shame of the desert, which grows
no food and waits for rain that rarely falls.

Infinity Sonnet

The numberless dead with eyes rolled back
like silent stars, the circumstance of life
that made it happen, the mad nature
of obstacles to progress. Idiot nature,
bare-knuckle brawler with too-tender skin.
I wish I could lick my own wounded skin
and get that cosmic fairy princess glow on,
but my tongue, too short to reach the nether place,
waves me back in the mud with frogs and newts.
What mean little commissar, growing
like a bubo in my brain, is whipping me
toward infinity? Each number is one
number more than the number before.
Not one interacts, that’s how infinity works.

Hypothermia Sonnet

Some folks move to Texas to die,
some folks die at home of hypothermia,
lonely as an organ donor, a collapsing
star gone cold, ending life as an aberrant,
utopian, the time line is beside the point.
If a revolution is the savage creation
of a new people, I’m having a single-day
high, interpretable, at home, louche as a lie-in,
meaning what feeling remains, constraint?
But I’m not at home either. When my mother
began to die, she didn’t recognize her home,
she looked around her bedroom with flinching
prescience and asked to go home. You are home,
we would say, but she didn’t understand.

Burial Sonnet

Poor Ham, punished for seeing his father
naked—not to say ogled, but what son
has gazed upon his father’s cock and not
been fascinated. It’s so much bigger,
so much more experienced. No one who
has seen the sight can forget the moment
when what is animal becomes human
and what is human becomes feral.
As visceral feelings stir in the breast,
some may for guidance look to bones,
that’s the classic move, and so, on the day
of the burial, we take your unbodied bones
out for a walk, and oh! it must be said,
between grief and nothing, I choose the dead.

Jeremy Freedman is a poet and photographer based in New York City. When asked if he would rather be given a truth or a dare in Truth or Dare, he answered truth, but retains the option to lie about it. More work can be seen at www.jfreenyc.com.