October 2005
Poems by Roy Alan Jacobstein
Pre-Med
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All semester in Psych Lab I shocked
the nictitating membrane of a white rabbit
(every ten seconds for seven minutes).
Our professor was making his name
puréeing smart planaria and feeding them
to dumb ones who then became smart.
It all had to do with DNA and learning
and memory, as I recall, and maybe
the Pill, or possibly the pacification plan
for Vietnam. Deliver direct electrical current—
It’s mild , he assured us—to that opaque bit
of ocular tissue, then enter the subjects’
responses into the charts in our cross-hatched
notebooks. I recall the experimenter (E—me)
seemed upset, far more distressed
than the subject (S: sleek fur, berry eyes),
though in time E would master the art of labeling
someone else’s pain a little discomfort.
Safari, Rift Valley
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Minutes ago those quick cleft hoofs
lifted the dik-dik’s speckled frame.
Now the cheetah dips her delicate head
to the still-pulsating guts. Our Rover’s
so close we need no zoom to fix the green
shot of her eyes, the matted red mess
of her face. You come here, recall a father
hale in his ordinary life, not his last bed,
not the long tasteless slide of tapioca.
This is the Great Rift, where it all began,
here where the warthogs and hartebeest
feed in the scrub, giraffes splay to drink,
and our rank diesel exhaust darkens the air
for only a few moments before vanishing.
Squid’s Sex Life Revealed in USA TODAY
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"Deep Sea Mystery Solved"
They say, mi amigo, genus Architeuthis,
giant male squid, you "measure 45 feet long
and would make calamari rings bigger
than a tractor tire."
(Sautéed in olive oil,
spread over a steaming bed of rice,
you'd sate a hungry battalion—lie low,
mon ami , down there in your inky cavern,
half a mile below the sizzling woks.)
They say you "use an extremely muscular
penis, three feet long and functioning
like a rivet or nail gun," that your "encounters
are infrequent and chance."
When passing a female "like two ships
in the night"
(apologies, my friend,
for the unbounded human appetite
for seafood and cliché),
they say you "quickly
maneuver to hammer into one of her arms
and inject under hydraulic pressure,
your six-inch line of sperm
undulating in the pitch."
At last they've captured the bare details,
but what do the scientists know of squid-time,
of how fast your waiting for her passes
in the safe cold depths,
and how love's tentacles hold.
They're downstream now,
beyond the falls,
eight or ten, or more,
out of the turbulence.
The Kagera River churns
onward into Tanzania, leaving
them behind in the backwash.
The smooth stone outcropping
of their native land hovers
over them like a mother seal.
They huddle against her
black flanks the way they leaned
into one another last week
in the Church for safety
in numbers. And now
that the machetes have passed,
the torsos are looking down
into the debris-choked shallows
for their missing heads and limbs.
Coming of Age
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We head to Fred’s Beds
for a futon, our first joint
purchase. She’s left the attic
of Joan’s Reducing Studio
to live with me in my room
atop Jewell’s Hand Massage.
I’ve always been nuts,
she said, for a guy who plays
harmonica. With luck, in moth-
light, we’ll make love on it
for the length of the three-year
warranty before we graduate
to mattress, box springs,
sleeping with somebody else.
Roy Alan Jacobstein ’69, ’73 MD, ’86 MPH is a poet and public health physician who lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina School. He has been an inner-city pediatrician, worked in Indo-Chinese refugee camps, served with the United States Agency for International Development and consulted to organizations ranging from the World Bank to the US Centers for Disease Control to Save the Children. He is currently the medical director of EngenderHealth, a nongovernmental organization based in New York City that provides assistance to developing countries in Africa and Asia in family planning, women’s reproductive health and HIV/AIDS.
His poems deal with a wide range of subjects linked with his work, but also much more. His volume Ripe won the 2002 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry.
Jacobstein began writing only in 1997, but since then he has published around 100 poems in over 30 literary journals, including The Gettysburg Review, Parnassus, Poetry Daily, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly. He won Mid-American Review’s James Wright Prize, and his book If They Don’t Have Ritalin in Heaven is a finalist for the 2005 Larry Levis Contest at Four-Way Books.
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