IMy son loads a toothbrushWith ozone. Tell me what you feel, I say.I feel like you’re a jerk.No, I say. Tell me what you feel.I feel like you’re worthless and I hate you. IIMy father calls. His father is in the ICU.I don’t know what to say. Well,My father says, I rototilled the garden today— IIIBetween teaching and parentingI somehow find time to notify my therapistOf a change to my insurance. IVWhat’s your mom’s mom’s mom’sMom’s name? VA man at the ATM is trying to depositHis hand. Where he isIs earth. He’s my father—my dadThe day before the day of my birth. VIIn the CVS, neon touches my son and IPretending to be strangers. VIIMy mother opens the ovenWith an oven mitt. Julie gave me this,She says. How is she, I say.Dead, she says. I told you that. VIIIKisha is awake—She thought she heard me groaning in my sleepAs if I suffered a violent blow to my face. IXMy mother would turn on the faucet,Wet a bar of soap. Her left handHeld open my mouth. XWhen will I reach the people I love?I sit where the shade would beIf there were trees.
Subjective Units of Distress
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- May 2, 2023
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Subjective Units of Distress from Childcare (c) 2022 by Rob Schlegel.
Appears with permission of Four Way Books.
All rights reserved.
Rob Schlegel is the author of three award-winning poetry collections. His fourth book, Childcare (Four Way Books, 2023) was published in March. He is a 2023 James Merrill House Fellow and co-editor of The Catenary Press. He has taught in the MFA program at Portland State University and currently teaches at Whitman College.
“There are few poets whose work I admire as much as I admire Rob Schlegel’s. There’s a nervy sincerity at work, a genuine desire to say what’s true—a role for the poet that emerges from the role of the parent. This voice combines the elemental depth of the fable and the immediacy of the interior monologue. These poems are as brave in their performances as they are profound in their claims: even the truest statements in Childcare seem to disappear as soon as they arrive, showing Schlegel to be the rarest of American artists, daring enough to test his wisdom against the honest brutality of everyday life. Schlegel does nothing short of renewing the power of American English to tell truths worth telling. He asks questions worth asking; he pushes the power of the language just a little bit further than we ever thought it would go, reminding us not just who we are but who we might become.”
—Katie Peterson
"I will never forget the moment, years ago, when I was sitting at my desk in Missoula and looked out the window to see, standing in my yard, Rob Schlegel holding out to me a large yellow fruit. He appeared an apparition. I think it was a grapefruit. I say remember, but I feel remembered by it, and by the look of wonder on Rob’s face, because that is the experience, for me, of reading Childcare: of being invited into the unexpected, often disarming, always arresting presence of his attention and his discoveries, and being inspired, by them, to get up, break the window, and seek out, for myself and the people I love, my own indelible fruit."
—Brandon Shimoda
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