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The jets made their marks above us
The oceans swelled in the future of our
Crippled smiles
In the city the opera went broke
Only to be reborn in some kid’s head
Asleep in a rented room
With a shaved leg and a swollen breast
We hold our bandaged hands close
To our chests as we sleep
Turned from the alley echo
Frightened of the invisible hand
That caresses the face
And shakes us from sleep
What of the rain on other planets
Every creature adrift in its own biology
The world is the mind and will not let go
Claiming itself
In the extremes of hellish beauty
In a world of innocent thieves
Cities awaken in the falsehood of the boulevard,
Abstracted beyond the ellipse
That keeps returning us to the pictures
We hold in our hands,
Arias whispered into our minds.
George Eklund
George Eklund is Emeritus Professor at Morehead State University. Eklund has published widely in North American journals, including The American Poetry Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, Cimarron Review, Epoch, The Iowa Review, The Massachusetts Review, The New Ohio Review, The North American Review and Willow Springs, among others. Most recently his poems have appeared in The Lindenwood Review, Poetry Fix, Red Booth Review, and Rio Grande Review, as well as The Heartland Review, Descant, Redactions, and Adelaide.
Eklund’s full length volumes include The Island Blade (ABZ Press 2011) and Each Breath I Cannot Hold (Wind Publications 2011). Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, Wanting To Be an Element, in 2012, and his recent collection, Altar, in September 2019.
The Fighter
After the last one hangs up the gloves
and goes home, he’s all mop and scrub,
a bucket of cleaner, a white canvas sack
full of sweat-stained and blood-flecked
towels used to sop the heads of kids
half his age. Some nights, he strikes
a fighter’s pose and throws a few jabs
at the body bag. He’s right at home
for a moment, twenty years ago, steel
in his veins and abs like a radiator rack.
The body fails. All bodies do. He spit
years into buckets that filled with bile
after factories and rounds of layoffs
and divorce and sons who don’t call
no matter how many years pass. Once
he closed his eyes at night and visioned
a life held high above a cheering crowd.
Never a boxer, he wishes he’d found
the sport. He wrestles the janitor caddy
to a stop and throws a few phantom
punches at his shadow on the wall,
where the young men fight themselves.
He can’t win this fight. The man knows
every feint already. This sparring
partner has made the same moves for years.
Jeff Newberry
Jeff Newberry's most recent book is How to Talk About the Dead (Red Hawk Publications, forthcoming). An essayist, novelist, and poet, his writing has appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals, including Brevity: Concise Nonfiction, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Red Rock Review, and Laurel Review.
What, exactly, makes an object or place
sacred? Because when I hear
that word, I picture a person—my father, alive,
inhaling a lake-side starscape after ousting our
fire, or slouched, smug, in his junky Civic, grinning his smart-
assed grin, as if aware
he’s someplace he’s forbidden. In memory’s elevator, he wears
his sacredness like cologne—a pullied place
scaling past to present, where I can’t outsmart
my sentimentality. Here,
doors open to camping trips, races I won—our
superlative moments. I’ve
entered a grief that sees the world alive
with my father’s loss—shirts he’d wear,
jingles he’d hum, the organic brand of flour
he used to bake bread—these things pulse an essence in places
only I can see. And everywhere
becomes aisles at a Grief-Mart
under-charging currencies of want. So, I return to art—
sketching—pieces unbound to his presence—but absences live
in them like pacing tenets. And now here
I am, unsure of where
his ashes ended up. There was no funeral and I haven’t visited his place
since before it happened. So, I know that our
home state will greet a version of me, giddy to spend hours
with him. I will try to smarten
myself stoic. But then I will enter that place
in our garage, his racing bike and the first unicycle he gave me, alive
with a sacredness that will wear
the breath from me. And I’ll know he isn’t here.
Courtney Hitson
Courtney Hitson holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia College Chicago and currently teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. Her poems have appeared in The Wisconsin Review, Hoosier Lit, The Mom Egg, and are forthcoming in Mcneese Review. She is a former Pushcart nominee and resides with her husband, Tom, (a fellow poet) and two cats.
