Poetry

Stadium Drive Beat

For Jack

The sidewalk girl fell apart on her cell like they do

at times, one hand on the pulsating black plastic brick,

the other catching tears with a broken-heeled shoe.

A silent what happened? what’s wrong? who died? and a shrug

as I pass and I’m A-OK. I tell myself everyone breaks sometimes,

moving on in a beat-up Ford Taurus, and I offer excuses:

It’s the distance, that’s all, the cold and the distance.

Grass seas, dirt, tongues, steel, empty space, concrete parking lots.

It’s the SUV cops and hookah bars downtown, and smoke,

flavored, cancer-causing smoke. I blame the radio boneyard sky

for carrying agents of its own destruction, dead signals wailing

the honeymoon’s-over tune of America. I blame the seas like

icicles on the American hobo’s unsaintly beard, stalactites

drip-drop dripping to the beat of some higher drummer

of the bleeding streets. America’s no longer singing, just rocking

to the paper-or-plastic Disney morale roll-over-Beethoven

I’m coming home-sweet-home Alabama, Washington, North,

South, East, West why not Kalamazoo? beat. No one

knows how they are going to die, but I see, I see it, and

it’s true the sidewalk girl is a Virgin rock, solid

at the bottom of America’s sea, covered in velveteen moss.

Delton Sonnet

The hot, dry dust of droughty Delton dusks

collects and clouds completely thoughts of past

excursions, childhood encounters, grown-ups

in their gardens, kids on sidewalks. The list

goes on and on, as the images collide

in waking dreams, dimly lit and damaged

with age, the sure effects of passing time,

certain lapses of the mind. Older age

plays games with the phantom pictures of youth

and the places it’s spent with abandon,

till all that seems left is the leaving. The truth

is you can never really leave a town

you were half raised in, and any distance run

will often bring you closer to it, even Delton.

“Delton Sonnet” first appeared in The Last COPD Anthology, published by the Delton District Library in 2007.

Morning at the Scottville Cottage

Mist rises on the lake and dew

sits gold and wet on window screens,

while skittish jays grasp seed-cage bars

and sway the morning’s windless swoon.

The day breaks swift and early cold,

shifts warm to hot as family wakes

to milk and toast with cinnamon

and fishing boats upon the lake.

“Morning at the Scottville Cottage” first appeared in the chapbook Other People, published in 2024.