Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

Shrine

Sometimes Jason is ashamed of the person
he is. He tells his Mother through his mind
he’s doing the best he can. If he had
a record player, maybe he’d dance
to Talking Heads around his shotgun shack
in his overalls and cloth baghead—his beheaded
mother’s head upon a candlelit table. Under
Weymouth’s bass, Jason’s sense of rhythm
is uneven, except for slow, mechanical walking
and breathing. Clumsy when he swings his pickaxe
and then, suddenly astute with spears, or garroting
Crazy Ralph with barbed wire. Jason can be a mystery.
Somehow, he makes it to Waterbury to the house
of Alice, the former counselor who beheaded his mother.
The actress playing Alice is uncomfortable filming
in the aftermath of being stalked in New York.
Jason places his mother’s head in Alice’s fridge
alongside Pathmark milk, Stop & Shop apple sauce,
before he drills an ice pick into Alice’s temple.
The MPAA-approved edits are so quick it makes the murders feel
swift and fleetingly unpleasant as a papercut,
little to reflect upon. The actress is done
with her scene, done with being Alice, and can go back
to her life—hopefully at peace. Jason somehow gets back
to the woods, maybe he gets on a bus or hitches a ride,
with his mother’s head in tow, riddled with worms,
or maybe he walks into streets and off-road into woods,
finding a sense of his way home, the way I would
imagine, while riding backseat along highways, sensing
something baleful running under the road under tires,
slipping out the car into kudzu, disappearing—
to carry on as someone else. See mother, I did it
all for you, Jason says through his mind.
And then a pang of shame hits. I never had the guts
to run away, I stayed in the car as night fell, staring
at the orange-red blur of taillights from all
the enormous automobiles, as Jason, somehow,
in his shotgun shack of tin roof rain,
had the patience to carefully, methodically, light
candle after candle, lamenting his mother.

 

Jeffery Berg’s poems have appeared in most recently in Pine Hills Review. He currently lives between Jersey City and Provincetown and regularly reviews films for Film-Forward.

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.