Loudly, at the League of Women Voters book sale,
my sixth-grade son asks me
“Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?”
His four moods are silly, angry, hungry, and asleep.
A battered copy
of the DC Comics series lies
between Donald Duck and a graphic memoir of Palestine
on the genre-sorted table
in the vocational school gymnasium.
Harley Quinn
in screaming pink and clown whiteface
giggles silently like the ghost
of my son’s first mother.
No liver anymore,
the liquor pours right through her, infinitely.
I want to quote him General Patton’s line
about making the other guy die for his country.
We’re the opposite kinds of autistic, though,
so my explanations tend to outlive
his interest in the question.
He has never hurt anyone but me, including himself.
The Joker is a unique villain with no origin.
Diagnosis: purple.
The Suicide Squad are prisoner-assassins
with kill switches implanted in their necks
if they try to escape
instead of hitting other targets of the state.
In my recurring dreams I am twelve
and planning my own death,
which never happened.
Don’t tell my mother
it’s possible to survive with your head blown off
(as a crocodile, as a walking block of stone,
a starfish, an ooze)
but not without freedom.
It’s a little
known detail that Harley
was an adoption social worker
until she determined Myers-Briggs was bullshit.
Because I made it up.
Not like the printed truth
that Deadshot loves his daughter
so much he breaks kneecaps
to pay his child support.
Sometimes my son can’t stop laughing
when he twists my arm.
I will spend sixty-seven dollars
on middle-grade novels about sled dogs
but first I answer him: “No,
I’ve always been too angry to die.”
Jendi Reiter is the author of five poetry books and chapbooks, most recently Made Man (Little Red Tree, 2022); the story collection An Incomplete List of My Wishes (Sunshot Press/New Millennium Writings, 2018); and the novel Two Natures (Saddle Road Press, 2016), which won the Rainbow Award for Best Gay Contemporary Fiction. Their novel Origin Story is forthcoming from Saddle Road Press in 2024. They are the editor of the writing resource site WinningWriters.com.
