“NIRVANA” AND OTHER POEMS
Image licensed via Adobe Stock. Edited.
NIRVANA
When I was young the fucked up kids
slammed in the pits, raging
against suburbia’s poisoned air.
They nodded out in basement apartments,
cupping their hands around a flame,
Jerry Springer sputtering on the screen.
In the old nonsense video a janitor
thrashes slo-mo around his mop,
trying to dredge up the sharper pain
of being young. The cheerleaders go wild.
I mixed bong hits with Southern Comfort,
spent all night communing with the tube,
watching my heroes go to spit.
I sang into the muzzle of a gun.
A SUNDAY DRIVE
a gang of sparrows breaks from the dying oak
the last sputter of a pointillist’s brain
before it frizzes out down the road
our babysitter hangs from her seatbelt in an overturned jeep
across the field a farmhouse glitters like a chandelier
two officers trudge over the ditch in blue parkas
in his drinking days
my first boss’s girlfriend left his sorry ass at a rest stop in Ohio
he bought a pint climbed to the top of a semi trailer
and fell asleep to the engine’s lullaby
woke on the highway in a hail of insects
and hung on by his fingernails for two hundred miles
until the driver finally had to piss
when I knew him he was sober living in a trailer full of cockatiels
half-crazed from the racket
we rolled sod pulled weeds from lawyers’ gardens
years later I saw him at the Esquire feeding tequila shots
to a woman with three inches of black roots in her hair
I was not in the business then of questioning
the choices of men in bars
the officers cut the girl from the car and lower her to the frozen ground
she sits a minute then gets on her feet and staggers toward the strobing lights
leaving a shoddy angel in the snow
LIKE MARY OF EGYPT
I’ll have a lion dig my grave
a roughshod pit open
to the auguries of crows
bowing in the scarred pines
no slick montages please
life was short enough
only the flash of heat lighting
everyone I hate decked out
and weeping gin into the soil
as my soul ascends if not to heaven
at least to the roof of the 7-Eleven
when the music drains away
a column of bees rises from the ditch
moss-faced electric immune to us
POEM TAKING FLIGHT
I used to see myself as part of the tableau—
walking a furrow, dust reddening my cheeks,
a theme song pumping from the hay bales
on the hill. Overhead, a scatter of cranes
wound their rusted gears. Play the video:
their black insistent outline on the winter sky,
legs stiff as oars. Wind rushes through the arms
of a dying elm and by some backwards miracle
a rust belt town—forge for brick and steel—
rises up around us. Roots buckle sidewalks,
the Baptist Church crumbles at the edges,
busted factory windows blink in a chalk-drawn sun.
Did you know a swift can heave itself
from the eaves of a French cathedral and fly
ten months without a stop?
And yet we call them common.
There are three notes in a chord.
Leave one out and it sounds spare.
Not a holy trinity,
but a worldly one: the birds, the fields, the air!
SONNET FOR YOUR FUTURE
A woman fills the sink with soapy water,
pausing to text your obit to her daughter.
Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press. His third book, Ticker, won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press. His awards include an NEA Poetry Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist Grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and a senior editor at River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.