Ram Ventilation
After Mary Ruefle 

I ought to have been a shark, though 
I never really had any interest in them. 
I guess I just mean I’d like to keep moving. 
Or maybe that’s not it either. Maybe 
I ought to have been a racer, on an oval track, 
where success is bred from patience. 
Two hundred laps. Where top speed 
is more accurately, top speed before 
disaster. On the broadcast, they’d say, 
“See that kids, he wins because he waits,” 
when the truth is, you have to be so comfortable 
with the G forces, it only feels like patience.
Two hundred miles per hour. Then again, 

we love to spin our lessons pretty. 
I wish I were more of a story, 
one they make loosely accurate 
movie adaptations of, some long dreamt 
upon talent who flamed out young, then, 
through years of rehab, and time away 
from the spotlight, worked his way back. 
Not to the top, maybe just back enough 
to do the thing, in the way that doing 
the thing can be enough. “I had to prove it 
to myself,” I’d say, in interviews.
Whether or not I have more inside 
of me to give, I’d like to know. 
I wish I were a picture frame. 
One whose picture is never changed, 
but maybe the glass cracks one summer 
in a U-Haul, and then is never put up again, 
but kept in a box labeled “VALUABLES” 
or “PICTURES” in fading marker, still 
making all the trips quietly, hearing lives 
unfold beyond the cardboard. 

I ought to have never cracked 
my head open on those garden stones 
when I was two. If I’d known my desire 
to flaunt my new ability to roll, 
would lead to being bunny
wrapped by a team of nurses, 
stitched back together, while my mother cried, 
and that leading to my squirming out of hugs
till the age of fourteen, and fainting 
at blood drives and vaccinations, 
I would’ve stayed in the stroller. 

There is a world where 
my knowing consequence 
leads to my staying put. But,
that world is not this world. No,
in this world I travel to find more 
of myself than I know to be comfortable.
Here, words like dreams and possibility 
and danger and triumph and regret all 
smell like blood. I am thrashed, constant
by fear that I could ever live stagnant. 
And, when I say live, 
of course I mean die.

Heredititis

Dad’s cancer comes back on a Tuesday, except this time 
in my throat. Except this time, it’s just a swollen lymph node. 

Let’s make a day of it! Call in to work, sleep a few hours, corpse 
pose, cat on my chest. He’ll live forever, I’m sure. 

Hope likes to spin on things in playgrounds that spin, so we go, 
dizzy ourselves, fall, think we’re dying. Or I do. I always do. 

The world can be beautiful this way,                             feigning. 
Surrounding is blurred colour, then breath, then a sharpness. 

Still

Yesterday, as I ran through the spring’s first hours
a child on a flaming bike, with a flaming helmet, 
ran over my shadow. Yards away, without breath, 
his grandfather smiled at me in stride. 
Basically, I wake up every morning anxious 
of what little is left of the day 
because when I was eleven, for an entire summer, 
an old man I hadn’t known told me I had talent. 
Told me not to waste it. I called him coach
and he called me ace, and I couldn’t help smile 
when he did so. When he died last winter, 
I spent more time crying than I ever had talking to him.
Nothing lasts, I know this—
but its the first day of spring and I can’t help 
but be a sunflower. My problem with joy is that 
my laughter is always leaving me. As the man passes,
I smile back, breathless as well, moving uphill. 
I like to watch ducks wade, 
I like to watch all things that have nowhere to be. 
The daisies, sprouting up near the bank, 
the fisherman sat next to them. 
There is so much peace here, 
I can’t stand it. I move, always, 
on pace with the clouds, 
since doing so means I’m able to. 
Since moving means trying and trying means 
something. When I was young, after school,
I would stand on the street corner, 
a block from my house, and wait 
for any car to get to the stop sign. 
Then I would run, creating my own chase, 
believing my life to be 
in the hands of my little legs. 
Crashing through the front door, 
I’d scream, “I think I made it!” 
I did this every day. 

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Jacob Gajic is a Canadian poet currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Minnesota State University, Mankato. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Writing at Northwest Missouri State University. He is currently a poetry editor at the Blue Earth Review, and his poems appear and are forthcoming in The Sport Scribe and Eavesdrop Magazine.