Short Film
Jakob Maier
You never look at the camera,
the audience only sees dark hair,
the back of your head as it turns
from knife block to countertop
to stove. A slow jam plays
as you make dinner for yourself.
You sway along with it, drinking
a little wine & thinking about
the things that you think about:
money, daylight hours, the briefness
of love, hydrangeas under the sill.
The audience doesn’t know this
exactly, so they have to imagine
your daily concerns, like how they
have to make up lyrics to the song,
the slow one that is too quiet
to hear well, the one you murmur
along with. One line, they think,
could be, “I want to disappear
into obscurity.” The other lines—
maybe something about politics
or endless wanting, or California.
They watch as you finish
cooking & turn with your plate
to sit & eat roasted asparagus,
lemon-soaked salmon, bread
so warm it throws off steam like
birds flocking away from trees.
The film ends when the camera
freezes on your turning face:
eyes closed as in sleep, mouth
saying something tender
to the person behind the camera.
POSSIBLE POINT OF CONTACT
Jakob Maier
People at the reading keep saying
‘authentic’ but no one really knows
what that means. Like whispering
into a big empty shell with nobody
around, so you echo there until
someone listens in. Or the word
‘joy’ whispered into or above
or around a white pillow.
Michael reads ‘cabinet orchard’
& it refers to something sad.
Rachel sits close to me & says
‘body ontology’ is her favorite
phrase, because bodies are most
real when in warm proximity.
Every poem is another failure
to get close to the thing itself.
Afterwards, we pick up worms
in the flooded parking lot
& watch them squirm off our hands.
Because it’s raining, they swim
right back to us. We say ‘wow’
so it means something important.
INTIMISM
Jakob Maier
Walking in downtown Chicago, in the evening,
the day of the Greek festival with the streets full
& a group of men shouting by the stone lions
making all the tourists feel uncomfortable,
we spent $25 apiece for tickets
into the Institute where we shared a sandwich
& looked at the Charles Ray exhibition
until it closed, you liking his figures,
the metal-tooled spine in Shoe Tie,
me lying on the ground to see underneath
the fiberglass model of a crashed car–
hearing Don Giovanni
from the Intimism exhibition in the entrance hall
where it played over projected sex chats on loop
& people laughed
& I saw the funniest thing there,
a sign in the souvenir shop that said
“Who Is Your Favorite Artist?”
as if that’s a question that can be answered
or should be answered, as if Bonnard
or you deserve more love, as if favorites exist
& we drove to Nathan’s house on 21st
where we ate tongue & fries from street vendors
before going to Alec’s noise show at Giron Books,
which was a sweaty affair & loud,
& that night we slept on the futon &
could have stayed together, but didn’t.
about the writer
Jakob Maier is the managing editor of Peach Mag. He is the author of Conversations (Ghost City Press), and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New England Review, Crazyhorse, Prelude, Hobart, and more. Find more of his work on twitter @goodtimejakob and at jakobmaier.art.