San Pellegrino, Room Temperature
by Doug Paul Case
The type of shit I say to J: We’re inside the poem, but the poem is a joke and neither of us is funny. He doesn’t laugh, which is good, but I’m learning not to care about the problem: I know he doesn’t laugh because he doesn’t get it and not because he gets it and knows it isn’t funny. I wouldn’t call the difference minor, but—and this is how I know my expectations are unjustifiable—my reaction’s informed by my past mistakes, most notably spending two years with a poet I knew would force me to leave him and then spending another two reading autofiction without remembering to cleanse now and then with Joy Harjo. Ariana Reines. Ross Gay. James Tate if you need a laugh. Anne Carson if you want to feel alive how you did in 2010 or too stupid to read anything but autofiction. If you don’t know, save yourself the trouble and don’t look it up. We have to be aware, I say to J, we’re always talking to someone, even when we’re inside the poem—perhaps especially then. We’re walking through the town’s new park when I tell him for simplicity’s sake we’ll call that listener R. I’d describe further, but I promised J I’d only use J to represent him, and I don’t want R to think R’ll get any clues. This isn’t to suggest J has anything to be ashamed of, nor that anything I’ve ever said, whether or not I thought it would be a surprise, has ever been a surprise to the person hearing it. J will tell you, and several of you Rs, in all likelihood, can confirm: I am terrible at falsehoods and secrets—which I’ll say is because I don’t see the point, but is mostly because I can never remember who’s supposed to know what and when. I’m also terrible at controlling what my face is doing at any given moment. The worst in Indiana, L once told me, but he didn’t seem to mind when we played “Pony” ironically and then not. That was during the autofiction years—cheap motels, or bleachers, or lakeside hikes with 40s and magnums. I knew nothing then, thought it had to hurt to have something to write about. Today’s difference: I know it was depression, not poetry. This is why, I tell T, no one likes their first books. Life happens when life happens, whether or not a poet’s there to document. Poetry’s only good for history and history’s only good for justice and justice, T says, doesn’t exist. Agree, disagree, agree. The biggest problem is history and who’s writing it, and the rest should be emotions expressed and popped like bubbles in seltzer. You twist, it asserts its presence, you react and move on. Instead of mentioning the theories of queer time I’ve been thinking about I ask T if she knew she was using L’s metaphor trick on me. Of course she says she doesn’t know what I’m talking about, which is either true and I’m still just seeing L everywhere, or isn’t and more people than I’d like know the fastest way to get me to get a metaphor is to compare whatever you’re talking about to something I’ve recently discovered and/or been obsessed with lately. Or, and maybe R would know, that’s just true about everyone. I never took that psychology class I’d been thinking about auditing. Anyway, T knew L but doesn’t know J and it’s super unclear who R knows, but they all know how obsessed I’ve been lately with San Pellegrino—which I’d somehow lived thirty years having never tasted it—and specifically with drinking room-temperature San Pellegrino from a glass bottle. It’s not right poured into a cup. It isn’t right cold. It’s certainly not right from the plastic bottles. Of course I feel ridiculous sharing these opinions—and 100% for writing them here—but if it’s not just so it isn’t right. Sometimes J’ll ask why I feel this way, but I never have an answer for him no matter how much time I spend thinking about it, which is not an insignificant amount. Like, back to the park—which seems to go on and on, like we could walk an hour and still not have gotten to the amphitheater on the side furthest from the parking lot closest to our house—don’t let me get sidetracked by how far an hour is——: There’s a half-empty, perfect-looking bottle abandoned on a bench across from the pickle ball court, sweating, and J sees me seeing it and says, P, you don’t know whose that is. That’s the point, I say, and then I’m off, imagining the long list of people in this park who may have made the mistake of leaving their fizzy water behind. J probably thinks I want to take it with us on our stroll and finish it, but more than that I want to feel like this park’s in Italy and not Indiana, that we’re less than an hour’s walk from the ocean and it’s the perfect level of warm out, so when you swallow you feel the liquid sliding and the bubbles popping but you don’t get the shock of a temperature difference. Something about that makes me feel more alive, more physically human than anything I can presently come up with, another item for the list of reasons to pray for capitalism’s dismantling. R, the jump’s this: nothing that celebrates your humanity should cost. There’s enough. But as things are, a shame to abandon a bottle. I know J can see the disappointment on my face and I know he doesn’t know what to say to snap me out of it, though he wishes he did. At least, I think, L isn’t here to tell me not to cry over a bottle even though he’d know it isn’t about the bottle at all, not really. T says I shouldn’t compare J and L so directly, and in theory I agree but it’s not—I need to figure how to say—about their differences but about my growth. To know how I am in this world and to know what’s good for me and to know how to slow enough to understand it. J makes me feel tethered to the ground, stable, instead of guilty for wanting such permanence, such illusion against our fleetingness. Still, my thanks to time for getting me here. My thanks to this page for showing me I’ve gotten here. Poetry’s good for this: finding an interior mirror. History for this: seeing in it how you’ve changed. And justice: realizing you shouldn’t go back. Who doesn’t want the future to be a simple one. We’re far enough from the playground, dear R, that you wouldn’t think we’d be able to hear the children’s laughter, but here it is, echoing, and for a moment it seems possible. Maybe it’s the sunlight, or maybe it’s
his hand grazing mine
its static only to say
hey it’s me and you
Doug Paul Case is a photographer and writer based in Bloomington, where he teaches at Indiana University. His debut collection of poems, Americanitis, is due out in late 2022 from Black Spring Press Group.
