Rice Balls: New York, 1983
Your skin is yellow and you
weigh about 100 pounds.
Your face is gaunt and your
eyes bulge out of your head
like the eyes of fly. You are
inert, wasted and wasting.
You got the flu but it wouldn’t go
away and then came the lesions,
first on your shoulder then your
chest and now they cover your
torso like you’ve been leeched in
the Dark Ages. You took yourself
to the ER where you lay on a
gurney in your own shit for hours
and then you were put in isolation,
told you have AIDS and now
you will never be touched by
an ungloved hand again.
And it keeps getting worse.
Your veins burn from one medicine
while your brain is being eaten
alive by some virus only birds get.
Meals are pushed into your room
by terrified orderlies but you
can’t bear to eat them because the
lesions are in your throat too. Your life
has become some medieval nightmare
and apparently you are going to
expire in absolute agony.
It is the reverse trajectory of
The Wizard of Oz where you
are thrust backwards into a
grim black and white world
forever banished from the
vibrancy of your beloved
New York that you chose
like a promised land.
Only a month ago you were at
home in your 5th floor walk-up
with the slanted floors and
high ceilings in Little Italy
where a fat lady with big red
hair sat outside your window
at a card table selling rice balls
out of tin foil pans. She made
them in her tenement kitchen and
would show up everyday at 3 yelling
Rice balls, come and get ‘em!
just when the local school lets
out with the mostly Chinese kids
whose mothers were there to get them,
and no one was speaking English.
The rice ball lady had a broom the
handle of which she would wave
and poke at people, mostly Black
people, when she didn’t like them.
Once you called the police to
report this and they just laughed
when you told them where
you lived.
And now, nothing is left of you but
this wasting, gasping, collapsing, fevered
body well on its way to becoming a
corpse. The doctor tells you, through
his surgical mask, that you are
‘putting up a good fight’ but you’d
like to hit him with the handle
of a broomstick and finally
buy one of those rice balls.
Playlist
Somewhere between Marianne Faithfull
and Leonard Cohen I decide to add
Burt Bacharach to the playlist I am making
the first few notes of Jackie DeShannon’s voice
singing What the World Needs Now bounce around
the airy room – living room dining room and kitchen
all in one – and can be heard outside by the pool
which is being heated because the nights are still chilly
and cannot be heard by our old dog who is fast asleep
on the rug by the fireplace having given up hope
for a ride in the Jeep his favorite thing
and then there you are standing next to me with
your food-stained blue cooking apron on and your even bluer eyes
and here we are carrying on waiting for house guests to arrive
so I wonder what I will play next and I think
perhaps Jimmy Webb might be right his voice plaintive
and unadorned singing Wichita Lineman the song he wrote
I need you more than want you and I want you
for all time yes that should do the trick
hold everything together and be soft enough to
not wake the dog.
by Jay Kidd
Jay Kidd is a student at the Writers Studio in New York, studying with Philip Schultz. His poem “Lost Time” recently appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
