Winter Solstice, Little Caesar’s Arena
(for Cade Cunningham)
I don’t recognize myself in the losing, the questions after
to be answered in the impatient
stranger’s gaze. This kind of night thickens in the lungs,
accruing by second hand, by squall
until I am abandoned to it, love poem collapsed beneath
the desperation of its lines. This is
the hour the guitarist on the corner begins to think too hard
on where the notes go and how
to stretch them as a streetcar chugs north on Woodward
almost soundlessly, sedans resigned
to passing single file on the left. In the arena, with its caverns
and a full bar every thirty paces,
the voice of the crowd is always disembodied, the game
hard to parse with all the December
pressing in like heartbreak past the metal detectors, the guards
posted before every entrance
and enormous window. How shall we speak of it?
We dive to keep the ball in bounds.
We hold tenderly the officials and swoop toward the rim.
To outlast the local weather
is an aesthetic choice—performance—the riff what makes
the good things happen, this math
of fretting mean. The second guessing is music too,
the solstice says. I will stumble
all the way up the lane, if I must, to get back on the board.
Dancing Slow
no calendar will claim us no method among the warehouses
we rendezvous vintage jukebox in our borrowed room’s
corner almost sputtering to life off the electric charge of us
re-learning to inhabit the same shared space this is no rite
no holy day just the first time in awhile your mouth’s on mine
the same old problem of how to train my out-of-practice lip
to pronounce the way I ache for touch the first one is a note
we improvise away from and return to while outside us the A/C’s
gentle commotion and the breathing of traffic continues I can feel
the feeling between us take over no longer an exposed nerve
alone in my waveband the possibility of contact itself becomes
a kind of contact the goodnight variations carrying us then
beyond intention and back into our tissues any moment
in the poem is right to volta any rhythm we fall into we remake
classic Motown garage rock forty-five the lyric rush of us
with my ear against your chest I hear it building the entire earth
vibrates and we aren’t simply on it I trace you your arrival
into the present tense like moon coming sudden through a cloud
Fit Check
Define uniform: coveralls, dress blues, apron with pockets
functionally useless. Our bravest face, our gladiator drag,
second-hand khakis and a golf shirt stitched with the corporate
insignia of FYE or Coldstone. Everyday told to be decent, to lose
our shapes inside of what we didn’t want, selling movies,
serving food or cooking it, assembling a car we couldn’t afford
even with our discount, clad in bowties, straight-ties, nylons,
our scrubs in assorted shades. Somehow, we manage to make it
look so good, the broken-heel best intention, the scuffed jean
and secret hole-ridden sock we don as if in protest of
the daily masquerade. We clear away the leaves, scatter sawdust
on the schoolroom floor strutting in our worst vest, bodice,
government issue coat, embroidered. This, our first recital,
game face, our cover song pitched for someone else’s range,
the name that was never ours to which we must respond—
an inheritance, the disquiet that inhabits us by dawn or later,
post-shift, returning to find our children sunk already into sleep.
Autotopia
(Royal Oak, MI)
The street names would deflect off a stranger, but still, I must insist
upon their music: Greenfield, Fourteen Mile, Woodward south
bypassing limit after city limit by Tempo, by Caravan,
the corridors of storefront, the intersections imposing order
on the loam. Autotopia, secret capital of steel and automation,
you are calling me back into the rhythms that produced me,
the conveyor belts, fast food, the hospital tower where I was born
and its shadow, the province of tool and die. You are so cloaked
by public life it can be difficult to illustrate your scope,
the scaled-up capacities and disasters, the corporate-speak
leaching into conversation to explain away how human error
is multiplied, even as the human is displaced. What is it
you are building here from the unresolved noise of the past—
these concrete stanzas, startling in their efficiency, that correct
our every movement into sense? The cars putter along
their assigned tracks from office to station to repair shop, blasting
exhaust over walls and bridges that can no longer hold together,
materials flaked away like too-dry skin. Autotopia,
this is a resolution to speak less sensibly: I am destroyed minute
by minute on waves of body weather, hip twinge, sickened
cells dividing without logic or approval. The microplastics
lurking in my blood laugh at the arbitrary lines you have inscribed
along the earth, your careful phrasing, the borders necessary
to sustain you, your empire of diminishing return.
Sh-Boom
Once I’m moving the moving gets easier I get downhill
into the space around me the life-size monster ghost I am
the skeleton bobbing over carpet fiber bathroom tile
arms circulating because it seems like they’re supposed to—
he won’t remember this my son babbling his matchbox epic
by the couch inflections of speech although the doctor
says his words are coming late Sh-Boom the song shuffles
over the speaker he knows it from a film he puts his hands up
Sh-Boom I sweep him into the air above me and for now
my knees the bad spaces between bones shuttle all of me
just fine shoulders in the game too doing work that won’t
show up in the stat sheet this is the process our daily ritual
he grabs tight to my chest for now he fits there and we fall
into a glide unthinking past the plaster crumbling at the window
boxes in the closet I never did unpack inside me is a liver
that isn’t too sick yet and inside him a heart that is still growing
Sh-Boom this is our national anthem our call and response
air conditioner softening the wall obviously patched our books
scattered before the table Sh-Boom I am always awakening
and always here the music a door back to my senses the body
a door back to my world let’s say there was a song dear reader
that changed everything a current of sound you stumbled on
as if it had been waiting for your notice where were you
when you heard it who were you with what did it make you feel
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Andrew Collard is the author of Sprawl. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, AGNI, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his son in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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Tim Fitts is a short story writer and photographer. His work has been published in the New England Review, Granta, Shenandoah, Boulevard, fugue, and the Baltimore Review, among others. His photographs have been shown in South Korea and the United States, most notably the Thomas Deans Gallery in Atlanta. His photographic works often combine color transparencies, as well as transparencies with black and white film.
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