THE SOFTNESS
But when I talk about loneliness I’m talking about softness
& when I talk about softness I’m talking about being a big
man, so I’m talking about at least the suggestion of violence,
the way I like to wear my hair & my beard, & this fractious
Russian monk’s face, which I’ve tried to soften with round
tortoise-shell glasses & a desperate lightness about the eye,
but still I am, compared to most men, I would say, hulking,
so when I talk about loneliness, yes, retribution is implied—
I played Jud Fry in my high school production of Oklahoma!
& members of the football team told me how frightening
I was & I was infatuated with the girl playing Laurey who
who was infatuated with the boy playing Curly & I let my
patchy beard come in & stalked the hallways, I might have
told you I was being method but it was just an excuse to be,
for a few moments, as angry as I was, looking at the world
from underneath my eyebrows, imagining I was the kind
of man who could set a barn on fire for love, but I wasn’t,
I was a Ferdinand, wanted to sit just quietly & smell roses
thrown by the women into the arena around me & imagine
for a moment that the roses were for me & not the matador
who would come to cut me down—I felt like that but in fact
I was cruel to my peers, in fact I body-slammed a boy against
the lockers & laughed & made him laugh with me—I had
earned, I felt, this cruelty, & I have had to unlearn it, learn
softness instead, because loneliness was trying to turn me
into something I hated, it still tries, I was the fat kid & now
I am the big man, I look at the men the women date instead
of me & wrestle myself away from the brutal conclusions
& I feel something rise up, something older & angrier than
I am, & so I must remain soft, committed to softness, must
commit myself every moment to softness, must water my
plants & sit in my room & imagine how soft I will be, how
terribly soft, should I drag myself out of these circles &
back into the world.
THE TENDERNESS
yesterday I stopped in the middle
of a run to help a UPS man carry
a large rectangular box to the door
of a house. No big deal. Just
a thing I did, for a fellow human
who I care about, even though
he was a stranger. Just a moment
of practicing tenderness which is
a word I like & would like to get
a tattoo about—ideally, this line
by the poet Aracelis Girmay:
& so to tenderness I add my action
as a reminder to me to always be
tender, & so also maybe women
who I am attracted to might see
that I take more than a passing
interest in tenderness, that it is
something important enough
to me to set permanently into
my very flesh, & maybe they will
look at me & the tattoo & have
a feeling of me being good at
kissing/touching & will approach
me in the bar & I will put down
whatever book I might be reading
& say hello & this will lead toward
something like a wedding, a grand
ceremony during which my family
will speak in hushed tones with my
friends about how far I’ve come
in such a short time & I will hear
& pretend not to hear, but hold
my brave bride closer to me, who
was willing to approach me all
because of this tattoo that I have
not gotten yet but think of often,
this potential tattoo that proves
what went unwitnessed: moment
I am writing about because no one
was there, no one saw me helping
this man with the box, bearing
the large box upstairs, stopping in
the middle of a run which it’s hard
to build momentum back up once
you stop running, but I did, I did
do that, & I want you to know
that this happened because you
were not there to see it & you
should have been there, who-
ever you are. Likely now I am
addressing the same woman who
will approach me in the bar &
see my tattoo & come to love me
so easily, woman I address in all
my poems, who is very specific
in that she loves specifically me
& sees what a good good tender
person I am & would throw her
arms around my shoulders as I tell
how I helped the man but leave out
the part where his route coincided
with my run, & each time he passed
he said thank you again, & how each
time he said it I felt less & less like
the person who helped him until
finally he said thank you & I did
not respond, I lowered my head
& kept running down my street,
up the drive, headlong into these
penalties I have, thanks to my
tenderness, earned.
Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, playwright, teacher, and extremely amateur gardener. His poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of two collections of poetry: Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (not a cult press, 2017). He was born and lives in Los Angeles where he earned his MFA in Eating Large Sandwiches at Brent’s Delicatessen. Follow him @germyradin