Endgame

By Mitchell Bodo

I haven’t thought about it for a while. I haven’t run
the dishwasher or scrubbed the bathroom tile
 
of its last scrap of grit. I haven’t called.
I haven’t been to see my grandma at the nursing home
 
on Heritage Green. When I came out to her, and by that
I mean when my parents came out to her for me
 
on my behalf, I like to imagine a multi coloured newsletter,
confetti and Lady Gaga, when really it was more a series
 
of phone calls, a dial tone running down the family line.
Before the nursing home, I went to visit her at the house
 
on Lawfield road. The living room was littered with ceramic
beagles and Bing Crosby echoing from a clamshell CD player.
 
There was a silence shaped, if not exactly like a penis
then at least something as awkwardly familiar, just as strange.
 
She didn’t know where to begin and asked about school,
if I was still working that job I disliked. Now she works
 
to remember, flipping through old family photographs
blown up large and laminated. This is Mitchell.
 
This is my grandson. This is the dog I had that died.
She asks how old are you now? Do you have
 
a girlfriend? It’s been so long and Nagg and Nell
​shut their garbage lids one by one.

---

Conditionals

By Mitchell Bodo

It wasn’t my worst idea. It wasn’t
my worst idea and also wolves.
It wasn’t my worst idea and really,
if you think about it, it shouldn’t have gone
the way it did and yet. It wasn’t my worst
idea and yet totally it went the way it could have gone
given the facts and maybe and also sure.
It went the way it could have gone and totally
totally totally. It wasn’t breakfast nook.
It wasn’t kitchen table chairs on the side of the road
stacked into my 2014 Subaru Impreza like Tetris.
It wasn’t Tetris. And totally. And totally it wasn’t
what we thought it might be but maybe it could have
given things totally weren’t the way they’ve been.
But they’re not now. But they’re not now and also
maybe. Maybe given what they probably already were.
If only we knew. If only we knew and also reusable
grocery bags and turtles trudging through the hot dry sands
and also sure. If only. Given the circumstances. Until.

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Keith Haring Keeps Getting Farther Away as We Measure the Distance Between Us

By Mitchell Bodo

You say it's too absurdist, too crude, too abstract to the one you came here with. There is nothing abstract about the end of the world. How many times do I have to erect life size cocks from stone before you get the picture. In 1988 at least ten thousand people died from from AIDS in the US and that isn't an abstraction, either. The first time I saw Keith Haring’s barking dog I didn’t know what to make of it. A lifted right leg. A stream of piss. The signifier worms its way into the cruising park of my mind and suddenly the images start to cohere: Pinocchio limbs exploding on television and televisions exploding on TV and I’m just getting started. I think I’ll paint my nails tonight. I think I’ll crack the window open with an old charcuterie board. Howl with the hundred hounds. Mickey Mouse with a lipstick dick. Is it wrong to say dick in an elegy. When I tell you I’m sorry am I looking for justice or absolution. Dick itself an abstract of something more clinical. It feels safest to start with black. Small shadowed pearls. The coal in the eye of a lover long gone. In the Uber ride back to Church Street, our driver warns us not to take the subway at night all those druggies and abstraction switchblades into the signifier of violence again. A liar’s nose bores itself through the image of a man. I was thinking of painting them blue then remember that blue is an abstraction of loneliness so I just forget it. Is queerness merely a problem of form. Do you think they would look better in burgundy or bright bright red. A red that burns. Flames fanning the only light in the last drag bar in the lowest circle of hell. Our palms caked white with chalk. It’s all we’ve got. Smudged edges. Lines and curves. The corners we draw ourselves into.

---

In Hamilton

By Mitchell Bodo

Everybody’s in love with somebody who’s in love
with somebody else: city of unrequited windows
where a woman scrapes her shopping bags along the side-
 
walk on the corner of King and James Street North
wears a t-shirt that says this city hates you too.
Above her the mountain lurches one half of the city
 
over the other. A dozen toilets flush. Street lights stall.
Eyes shake off their morning crust. On a Monday morning
the city nurses its collective hangover, dulls its headache.
 
From its flattened backroads in Binbrook to downtown
coffee shops and night clubs owned by the mob.
From the hookers on Barton, wondrous weird sisters whose high heels
 
echo like black keys into the night, to the suburb swaddled
sixteen year old boys who pelt them with eggs and nickels.
Where landscapers carefully plot purple vincas, stump sunflowers
 
by their bright stalks in rows by the highway,
locking them into place like house keys hidden in the dirt,
to those who cuss them out from behind the tinted windows
 
of their mini-vans for making them late to work. Where its only gay
nightclub’s patrons were arrested for public indecency more often
than they got erections and the city where my friend told me
 
he wanted to become a cop with eyes shining like twin barrels
dancing in the light. I’ve been to Prague. I've been to Banff. I’ve been
to Paris, France. I’ve walked the cobblestones. I’ve splayed my skis

in the snow. But there is nowhere more holy than a bad neighbourhood
bricked up houses, concrete slabs cracked and depressed.
Where north end Rottweilers stand guard on porch steps
 
while their mad dog owners rent their driveways
out for football games. A city which yawns
through cardiovascular sewers. Bored by its own disaster.

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My Name is Carnival

By Mitchell Bodo

I remember taking a party bus to Toronto.
I remember the rain failing. I remember the clouds
sweeping over the night sky, devouring the moon
the way a father devours his son.
Desire sloshing around our bodies like the drinks in our hands,
The Smiths over the loudspeaker bringing everybody down
and my friend who got so drunk
but that’s fine, that’s just Brent,
who walked entire trailers across the road
stood six four a hulking mass of meat
until suddenly it wasn’t fine, wasn’t Brent,
and what was there was screaming and yelling and crying
knocking over planters outside the bar it took three of us to fix upright.
He kept saying he wanted to join the army
to go somewhere cold, to kill them all, and there it is:
the gooey centre,
the marrow of the marrow of the bone,
the door to the billiard room of our bodies, where we ghost
our own words, which always stays closed.
The next day he was all palms and apologies:
I don’t remember I didn’t mean to call you that I’m sorry.
I’ll spare you the rest, the gory details
but will tell you that at the same party last year
he carried my drunk ass from the bar
propped me up like a crash test dummy on the party bus’s leather seats,
let me rest my head on his shoulder as I dribbled off to sleep
and that he put out small packets of candy for all our co-workers’ kids on Halloween.
Nobody ever pulled him aside.
Nobody ever walked him through the blacked out carnival row
of last night’s events, its funhouse mirrors.
Instead, Instagram suggests four beers in quick succession
the Philadelphia Eagles’ odds of winning the NFC East.
Looking out my office window now, trying to forgive him, cars whip
over the mountain and the wind whips over the cars.
Morrisey whispers something like to die by your side
as if the only way worth going
is the one where I pull you down with me.

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​Mitchell Bodo (he/him) is a poet from Hamilton, Ontario. His work has appeared in Pulp Literature and Quagmire. He is currently completing an M.A. in English in the Field of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, where he is working on his debut collection.