We’re losing the games we made up only to throw loose stones—
that Mississippi sediment
rushing and numb as the rumbling I-55
lit up in its long, northern yell.
This old home sleeps in prairie grass
lashing at our legs. We just keep walking,
like we’ll see the escape we keep going on about
or a decent reason to stay. Instead,
we wind up back at the old war cemetery,
gasping for air. We let our bones thaw there,
in an afternoon still as a room underwater—
still as a room in which someone we liked very much has died.
Nearby, fu dog sentries sit among some peonies
under the season’s first goldrush apple sunset.
They immortalized the death of the last centaur here.
The biggest turkey races parallel to the tree line here.
Inaudible snakes slip caramel-slow into the creek,
just before a white-tailed deer leaps for the road,
knocked in a flood of light
from one night to another.
Our black cat, trapped in the window,
yowls at the universe with all her nine lives
like a new constellation just pierced through the sky
and no one was around to see it.
See that field? It’s for corn, not soy,
and that one’s still smoking from yesterday’s burn.
Each one gets a turn. Each life here
a plot of regional waiting. Then, summer.
A rock plops off a railroad bridge,
followed by ten pale boys trying to fly.
The rumor goes: If you jump even a second too late,
the coming train will surely suck you under,
right back from the open air you leapt into.
Which of us knew how good we had it?
How lucky we were to choose our trouble.
How foolish to almost forget.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 2.
Bobby Bolt’s poems have recently appeared in Kissing Dynamite, EcoTheo Review, and Rogue Agent. He received his M.F.A. from Texas State University, where he was a Round Top Poetry Fellow and Poetry Editor for Porter House Review. Bobby now lives and writes in West Michigan, which has more bird-filled trees than he could ask for. He tries to learn something from each of them.
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