"Pink Toenails" and "Crowd"
New Poetry from The Metropolitan Review
We at The Metropolitan Review are excited to highlight these two poems by Jonah Raskin and D. Eric Parkison.
These poems explore longing and intimacy, examining the quiet moments that exist between people and the spaces in between longing. You can never quite know another person. You can love them or miss them or look for them, but even the closest, most intimate moments are still occurring between two different frames of reference.
In Harry Harlow’s famous and cruel experiment, where monkeys were separated from their mothers and provided with a “mother” that was made of wire and had food and a “mother” made of terry cloth, monkeys went to the furry inanimate object — the one more closely resembling their real mother — instead of the food source when they were scared.
Perhaps we are seeking comfort above all else. Who do you seek when you’re looking for comfort? How does recognition link — or betray — us?
—The Editors
Pink Toenails
In the apartment with the
windows facing
the bright white church, cross and
solitary steeple, he wakes and makes a
bed that’s too small and yet too big
for the two of them, him and her,
in a city where she’s at home
and he’s not.
When she visits
he reads to her;
she cuts his
toenails,
paints them pink
reads chapters from his books,
calls him “Maestro” and
“An American Master.”
Not the first time
he has heard such comments.
Is she conning him? And is he
conning her when he says
“I love you” and
“You’re beautiful.”
He spaces out; it’s as
though she’s
not there in the
fugitive fog. Today she says
“I want distance.”
But isn’t that what he has
wanted all along?
Alone in the
ambiguous bed,
he
gazes out the window
at the white church, the cross and
the solitary steeple
and down at
the toenails
she has painted pink.
Jonah Raskin lives and writes and performs his work in San Francisco. The author of six poetry chapbooks, including most recently The Thief of Yellow Roses, he has written and published a study of Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" titled American Scream.Crowd
I was in a crowd searching for your jacket. The crowd was thinning, the concert Long over, but still your jacket did not appear Among the others. I wondered if we had, After all, arrived together, if you’d been beside me, Whether I’d lost you in the concert hall Or some time before. Through the double doors I thought one fleeting second that I glimpsed A jacket just like yours and raised my hand As if I were in third grade and wanted Someone to call on me, to point to me And say, “Yes, you,” and then I put my hand Back down. Not you, no. You were someone else. D. Eric Parkison is the author of a chapbook, No Arcadia, which was published in the fall of 2020. The Massachusetts Cultural Council awarded him a 2022 Artist’s Grant in poetry. He is programming director at the Gloucester Writers Center and lives in Lynn, MA. Find him at deparkison.com.
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