Gerald Fleming: California Poets Part 9, Three Poems

Gerald Fleming

December 22nd, 2025

California Poets: Part IX

Gerald Fleming

Three Poems

Linda

“She didn’t want her, & when I reached out & took her & asked what name she said Whose name? & I said the baby—the baby’s name—& she said Oh, I thought you meant mine & it was clear she was a woman without antecedent then I thought she said Linda, & I said Linda? & she said No, I said LinDA, LinDA, then turned away as if in dismissal of the grace of this child I held in the crook of my arm, who looked at me now, the mother striding up the hill & away & now the child was mine as in a sense she’d always been mine & she knew it & I knew it & each year then I put money away for the day—I could have named the day, there by the cyclone fence—that the mother would return & ask for her & show the license of her DNA, the slick card of her attorney—and I was ready, I’d saved, I’d practiced a law of my own, a law of enfoldment, articulation, attention, & in the end it was my daughter who saved me, money unnecessary, for she was fluent not just in the Latin of her beautyname but in the language—surprising, forceful, empty of vitriol—of repudiation.”

The Usher Explains

“Anyway it was that part where the church-man says Does anybody see any reason—and Jeanine’s sittin’ over there on the side all low-cut—quiet for a change, blowin’ her nose into this big purple rag & the guy says it again like he Knows Something & Jeanine giggles & Stanley’s standin’ next to me there in back, Stan laughs, slugs me in the arm, Stop, I say, & he does it again like when we were kids, but this one went right to the bone, hurt like hell, I mean I TOLD him stop, so I just clock him one, his head snaps back & that black tooth gets all stuck in his bottom lip & he takes me by surprise, dives at my knees—this bump here, it’s where my head hit the pew—& we’re rollin’ around & all right I admit, I’ve got a tendency to bite & sometimes spit, but now this was evil, he’s got his knee right on my jewels, his hand on my Adam’s apple & I guess I aimed bad & my spit hit some guy from Q.P. Doll’s people—that’s what Stan calls her, Queen Priscilla for the way she orders Byron around, Q.P. for short, everyone on our side calls her that, but anyway that Q.P. dude gets all pissed off & jumps in & you know how it all goes so fast & now he’s on me pounding but most of the time missing & I’m almost up, but now Stan’s yanks me by the belt & you better ask someone else for sure, I don’t know I was pretty busy & like I take one breath & here comes Clarence, Mr. Best Man himself all the way from the altar & now it’s three brothers & one stranger, Clare-boy, he gets Stan by the hair slams his head into mine & now the other guy’s on Clare, random that way, but Stan, he didn’t deserve it—I think Clare, he’d been long time waitin’ to get at Stan, and this was an Opportunity, you see, he found his Opportunity, & I look up, catch a glance of Jeanine, she’s off to the side with this crazy-ass grin on her face & here comes Mr. Byron Bridegroom right down off the altar-kneeler thing & Stop! Goddamn, you guys, he keeps saying, Goddamn & tryin’ to pull us apart, then Don’t you USE our Lord’s name in vain, Boy, some old dude at the side says, & anyway Byron’s all in now, he’s got Clare in a nelson, all of us brothers in, just like the old days—Byron always had Clare in that nelson, you’d think Clare’d learn, and I know the whole thing was ugly, and I know some guests took a bit of blood and that other gal ruined her dress, but still & all there was a good Family Feeling there, in all that hurt I knew nothing could break us up, not even little Q.P. Doll standing there kickin’ any guy she could—even Byron, she’s even kickin’ Byron, her Husband to Be—& all the time saying You Fucks, You Fucking Fucks, in her wedding dress—that was the funny part, even after we quit, even after people left, Little Q.P. Doll saying You Fucks—kickin’ us with her little white shoes, oh that took the cake, I laughed, we all laughed except Q.P. Doll and that old guy from the other side—her dad, I guess he was. Then they left, too.

“She knew what she was in for, interfering with this family. She knew.”

On Boredom

Once he claimed the concept of boredom impossible, then one afternoon it came. He was in an apartment in Brussels, had money in his pocket, could hear notes of good jazz rising from a little club downstairs—he should go—but the feeling arrived like the moment one takes off one’s clothes and crawls into bed after a long, insulting day. A sense of being hollowed, the surrounding shell of skin having served only to mock his existence—his skull, too, a shell—pocked, every orifice of it explored by the breeze through the window, nothing at all within. The feeling stayed with him, bore down, all the outside world emptying—the newly cleaned Enlightenment statues in the wooded square below holding nothing for him, empty in their bronze skins.

            Then—remember the suddenness of that load of snow falling onto a man’s failing fire in the old short story?—it happened. The desk at which he was sitting had a long line of books at the back, next to the wall. Tall yellow ones, short brown ones, one called Reversing the Spell, a cracked blue spine that said Neruda, the variety of heights & shapes & colors, the potential of their contents perhaps interesting at another time, but not now, then WHOMP—all at once they sloughed left, the red dictionary at the end falling to the floor startlingly, the books still on the desk beautiful in their newly-stable thirty-degree configuration.

            He knew he’d been visited by an angel, pulled from an abyss that, though it had lasted perhaps not five minutes, though it had affected no one else, not even his wife in the next room—was precipitous, threatening.

            It was with a sense of gratitude, then, that he picked up the dictionary, straightened the books, and rearranged them—by size this time, so that they wouldn’t fall again.

Memoirist

            A man in his seventies decided it was time to write his memoir.

            Every day for a year he wrote. By June 600 pages, by the end of December—fall and winter having had an attenuating effect—a thousand, and finished.

            Half the things he said in his book were lies. Said he walked through a forest fire on Mount Vision, and because he’d just swum in a lake, was saved. Said he’d made a scholarly study of turnips, then parsnips, then carrots/potatoes/rutabagas, and only when he could sing by heart the family/genus/species for all—in rhyming couplets he’d devised—did he feel entitled to make a stew. Said he once worked on a Portuguese fishing boat and on its way out of the harbor at Cascais it shattered to splinters on a reef and he clung to the shattered bow until a retired Senegalese Coast Guardsman swam out, saved him.

            Said he had some of the years confused, that he hoped “the reader” would forgive him.

            Said he had a starring role in a lost play of Aristophanes, that he was a descendant of Blaise Pascal, whose anti-Semitism did not pass down to him, that Obama once referred to him as the common man from whom he most often sought advice, that for a period of two years he powered his kitchen lights with dry ice.

            He typed it up, repaired his hairline/double chin/cross-eyes in Photoshop, bought an ISBN, sent the book to an on-demand printer, and two weeks later got two books back. One for the local library, one for him.

            I know nobody, nobody knows me—who’s to say I wasn’t this? he inscribed on his own title page. Who’s to know who I was or wasn’t kissing? A lie’s just a life, one letter gone missing.

Author Bio:

Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop (prose poems, Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn). Other titles include One (an experiment in monosyllabic prose poems, also Hanging Loose), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco), Night of Pure Breathing (Hanging Loose), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). His work has appeared in many magazines and anthologies over the decades, most recently in Best American Poetry 2025. Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools, and he lives most of the year in San Rafael, California.