Jeff Friedman

What You Can’t Fix
May 20, 2021 Friedman Jeff

What You Can’t Fix

 

She was always fixing me, stuffing filler in my holes, applying putty or crazy glue to seal off any cracks to be sure nothing got in. She would pace in front of me as if I were a sculpture, looking at me and thinking and then she would release herself, satisfied for the moment that the holes were gone and that I was becoming something beautiful and solid. Still there were holes in my mind she couldn’t fix, holes where the light got in and sometimes snow and rain, holes where my thoughts escaped when they had to. But when she put on her blue satin kimono and hovered near me, I could forgive her. When we made love, it was like hearing the rain beat on the roof, knowing it will not get in.

 

*Written with Meg Pokrass

JEFF FRIEDMAN has published nine collections of poetry and prose, including The Marksman (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Floating Tales (Plume Editions/Madhat Press, 2017), and most recently The House of Grana Padano (Pelekinesis, April 2022), cowritten with Meg Pokrass. Friedman’s poems, mini tales and translations have appeared in American Poetry ReviewPoetry, New England Review, Poetry International, Cast-Iron Aeroplanes That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction Funny, Flash Nonfiction Funny, Fiction International, Plume, Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and The New Republic, and Best Microfiction 2021 and 2022. He has received an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship and numerous other awards and prizes.