Jessica Bozek

3 poems

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The Lone Survivor’s Tale

The government has tried to recreate my life. They’ve given me an office, though there are no other employees or even a company goal. I work alone. I don’t-work alone.

My voicemail message says, Hello. You have reached the Lone Survivor. Unless you are dead, do not leave a message.

They’ve given me a new house too. The distance between my new house and my new office is precisely that of the distance between my old house and my old office.

I never learned to drive, so the government runs a bus between my house and office. The bus driver wears dark glasses and a hood. She is the only person I see each day.

The government never anticipated having anything but records of the dead. There was no what if? No how do we make a life that isn’t worth living?

Food arrives daily in packages I don’t understand.

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The Public Relations Consultant’s Tale

We keep the Lone Survivor alive as specimen. On field trips our children visit the New Permanent Demonstration of the Untenable Existence of Destroyed Peoples at the State Museum for the Justification of Military Action. The teachers use their pointers and say sternly. The children yawn, but at night and for weeks to come, they wonder about the man who lives alone on this 3.2 mile tract. The brave ones vow to return at night.

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The Voyeurs’ Tale

Through the windows of his house, we located the Lone Survivor. He stood working at an easel, in an orange sweater. As if he were trying to keep someone away but draw someone else near.

The walls around him swarmed with paintings—of the same dog in different settings, groups of people, a small man with freckles under his eyes, that man’s finely boned hands. The hands alone and the hands manipulating marionettes whose mouths were smeared open.

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return to sawbuck 5.2

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Jessica Bozek is the author of The Bodyfeel Lexicon (Switchback Books) and several chapbooks, including Squint into the Sun (Dancing Girl). Recent poems appear in 751, Action, Yes, Artifice, Black Warrior Review, Guernica, horse less review, and Sixth Finch. Jessica runs Small Animal Project (smallanimalproject.com), a reading series based in Cambridge, MA.