FLOOD WARNING/HEAT ADVISORY
In July we sang cat tail whispers swaying in a heat
with the seasons. One month of rain made us
the most enlarged versions of ourselves,
so fullness became our biology, the Middle-West
with its many volumes inviting Gemini rain destined
to pale under an angry star. Battle cries rang
more like warnings in a song christened
Arthritic Bending and the Ultimate Snap. July,
when a supply vessel ailed by overpressure
events exploded in deathless spectacle
before piercing its destination. How I would learn
the dodged bullet perseveres, never homeless.
throwing wishes to the future, promises of autumn
for extinction of the present as a highway mirage,
one through which I drove with black-blooded
roadkill left behind in a poem called
How to be One with Nature: Something I Learned Too Late.
EURYDICE IN REAR VIEW
It won’t really feel like leaving
if you remember the scar hiding
just below your hairline, how places
like this could split you red and wide
and flying into the next, your
swordsmanship tested and proved
absent on two continents—some
fingers were harmed in the making
of this food—while three Japanese
characters were drawn in the making
of your name, the one found
on a green sheath because what’s
the point in concealing a sword,
and if you remember old thoughts
like how people used to look braver
and swing battle-worn words at each other
in the pictures you weren’t alive to take,
then this might look more like a time
machine than an escape plan,
where nervous fingers run through
your hair, pulling like tires for answers
in the foreground and if you hit a bump,
slip and fall between the creases
of your brain then think of a four-mile
island, letting the luck of fifty polydactyl
cats and their leader MacLeish float you
back, chasing the far-away echo
you thought you heard, and if you keep
her voice closer to your ear like
the freckled reminder of a piercing
that never happened, or the poem
in the towered, singing bell then
you’ll know to keep near some coverage,
all walls and ceilings and floors
and the matching shapes within remind you
what will blanket your nervous sleep:
the lesson of spider-child born in the center
who uses his years to spread and re-center,
as such you will leave your crisp summer stanzas
of corn and soy with the sight of her
footprints on the unwashed passenger
side windshield, and some home can fly
with you to other towns on golden song
where you might close your eyes, and breathe.
MOTION SICKNESS
There’s a curious movement in going anywhere,
and didn’t you know we’re all hanging,
spinning upside down and dangling
by the roots? Stay still if you like, and stare,
or go find a way out but even if you runhere
you’re actually going there. Not lost, but losing
change and keys, heels over head when moving
more around the question than toward. Veering
blood unequipped with rear view, your vessels
won’t move backward, just stop and flow.
A thousand numbers you’ll never know, breaking
codes and making codes and who guessed
the end from Mayan stone? With buttons pressed
on peace we’re waging, vacant silos make our homes.
Bobby Bolt recently received his BA in English from the University of Illinois at Springfield, and will begin his candidacy for an MFA in Poetry at Texas State University this fall. At UIS, he served as Poetry Editor for both Alchemist Review and Compass Literary Journal—the latter a publication he co-founded with some classmates. Bobby’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Postcard Poetry & Prose Magazine, Route 7 Review, Amore: An Anthology of Love Poems, Rappahannock Review, Sink Hollow, Runestone, Pretty Owl Poetryand Lincoln Land Review.
Bindweed Magazine 