"The Company of Men" by Benjamin Grossberg

The Company of Men

No way to be sure the man isn’t lying
afterwards, when he stands and tells you
that he has cancer, then adds
stage four and touches his chest. Nearly 40,
bearded, careworn, but also boyish, a little
vulnerable in his heavily lidded eyes.
Everything he says is a mumble followed
by nervous laughter. No treatment
this time—even after that, the laugh—
I’m just going to try to have some fun first.
If you had a record of his voice, old vinyl,
you could slow it on the turntable, use
your fingers to drag and deepen it, give
his words an appropriately sodden weight.
Maybe draw out that final word, first,
for a full minute, letting it fill an otherwise
silent room. He doesn’t pause after,
throwing on his shorts, T-shirt, wind
breaker. In fact, he’s halfway down
the stairs while you’re still sitting up in bed
thinking about the ribcage you’d just held—
thin man, smallish, so you’d been able to
cradle him wholly, how you’d enjoyed
that fragility—and all the cancer inside it,
how, in a way, you’d held that, too.




Originally appeared in Copper Nickel 

---

Audio: Benjamin Grossberg reads “The Company of Men”

---

Benjamin S. Grossberg’s books include My Husband Would (University of Tampa, 2020), winner of the Connecticut Book Award for poetry, and the novel, The Spring before Obergefell (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. His latest collection of poems, When You Read a Novel the Dead Would Like, will be published by CavanKerry this fall.

Instagram