by Jack Freeman
Across from us the road curves irrevocably south like black magic,
the state fair sorcerer who sliced his pretty niece in equal pieces,
halves broken apart at the harried cortex, unbroken and unpieced-together,
a rook, a bishop, a castle, all cut in twine, occupying twice the space
on the board, the sunburnt kid steps out into the public pool’s eyeball,
nowadays opened all year round: the air temp never dips below hazard
heat like a wallet lying face-up on the cafe table: catastrophic
and exposed to perpetual sunlight, all our mint leaves wilt and shrink
back in the fertilized bank of garden along the poolside in which
we swim past midnight as the underwater glow mixes with leaf debris
kicked up by a storm named harvey fixing corpus christi by its palms
to the sand, flag poles topple one by one, their colors obscured by the storm’s
blanketing force, as if the north could withstand its summer beheading,
as if ice and exhalation are so easily discarded, and thus expended.
[Check out Jack’s back porch wisdom]
