Charity
I gave a woman five dollars
at the on-ramp stoplight,
under the overpass.
She's often there.
I often give her
five dollars.
Sometimes none,
I just drive by. Sometimes ten.
Is it okay to say this?
I paid someone's light bill without telling them.
I one time didn't exchange
gifts at Christmas, instead
gave the money
to a gay recovery house,
with friends we made pans of chicken
and rice and drove to local parks,
serving it till we ran out.
I mean these things
to add up someplace
but they add up
to zero.
I look at my husband
and know I could say
so many unkind things to him.
I could hurt him. I know how.
I've got a lot of that in me.
Downstairs
Not everybody's happy place,
the cellar, with its narrow stairs,
the down there where the things are put
that can't be tossed though have no use,
what we'd rather not recall
but can't throw out because it's ours,
part of the house where we don't live
that makes the kitchen floor a drum
(kind of spooky, way our footfalls
echo someplace where we're not),
that grows restless if we watch
slasher movies while alone
as if there's always part of us
we'd like to push down to the dark.
But no one there when we descend,
just a mild attentive gloom
not housing evil in our house,
nor is grabby, nor resentful,
underneath to all our doings
and where all our doings stop,
if explored then well done now,
and friendly to this present flesh.
This Life
that isn’t mine
but whose I am
once said,
"Will I work for you
or will you work for me?"
Decades later, decades later,
I said, "I need a job,"
and saw I'd been hired
back before childhood.
I don’t know what my work is,
what it yields or where it goes
except that it is its own wage,
and that I am a wage paid to itself
and in some way not yet explained
am my employer.
The Friend
is an island in the sea,
a corridor of sky in the trunk of the car,
stars in the center of the earth.
Around the friend on all sides forever
is loneliness and solitude, as in paintings
by Greek Orthodox icon makers
the saint or prophet, the Mary or Jesus,
stands in a field of bright gold leaf
that recommends the figure to the viewer,
who devotes all their gaze to that face.
Inheritance
Seamlessly we inherit
other people’s memories--
summer camp when they were eight,
first sight of the one they loved.
In mistake we think we're them,
not noticing that can't be true
since we're not kids, or young with love,
but old and canny, and forever
we will be as we are now,
these same ones we've always been,
the furnishings of our houses
inherited, not purchased new.
Other years and other people,
few of whom we’ve ever met,
made our choices. We live with what
They selected. But we forget.
Peter Cashorali is a neurodivergent queer psychotherapist, formerly working in HIV/AIDS and community mental health, currently in private practice in Portland and Los Angeles.Recent work appears in Soul Forte Journal, Brief Wilderness, Gone Lawn, Lotus-eater Magazine. A chapbook, Yard Work, is upcoming from River Glass Books.
