by Steve Fay
What sleeps inside your form, your hair, your bone?
Ever it expands as breath—or does it stifle,
as the unvoiced consonant inside that name?
As the weight of the awaiting train.
As the tractor rolling over that dead boy
who stopped going to your school.
As memory of the beads of mercury your finger nudged
around the linoleum floor, before you put it in your mouth.
Those molten-looking blobs that did not burn—unlike
the just-used flashbulb placed in your same child’s hand.
Its weight forgotten, muffled like the world beyond
the passengers’ windows, until their train tipped over on its side.
With the fricative bustle of the house finches in your
garden, how you wish to finally wake from this.
Even as a sheet of butcher paper torn off along a blade.
And how the maps of every venture toward that love
scattered in the wind—is the other part of your story.
About the Author:
Steve Fay began life twelve miles from the Mississippi River in western, Illinois. Since the mid-1970s, many journals have published his poetry, which lately appears (or is forthcoming) in: Closed Eye Open, Comstock Review, Decadent Review, Jabberwock Review, Menacing Hedge, Santa Clara Review, Tar River Poetry, The Dewdrop, TriQuarterly, and Watershed Review. His collection, what nature: Poems (Northwestern UP, 1998), was cited by the editors and board of The Orion Society as one of their 10 favorite nature/culture-related books of the 12-month period in which it appeared. He lives among wooded ravines and a donkey pasture in Fulton County, Illinois.