Ron Koertge
I Like to Kiss
up against a chain link fence. White pickets too
churchy, wrought iron too Victorian. I like to be
outside an abandoned car lot, the weeds pushing
through the concrete and the fence wrecked just
enough to give a little as the kiss takes over
and delirium sets in.
We’re still on our feet and although that might
change I don’t care. I could stand there half
the night holding on,
my fingers curled in the diamond-shaped spaces.
I’m breathing as hard as any punk in any movie
running from the cops
who scrambles up and over a chain link fence
except I’m not going anywhere. I’m here drunk
on these pitiless
kisses as I claw at the fence like the animal I
for the moment am.
Ron Koertge
Red Riding Hood’s Mother
walks her to the edge of the forest. “It’s time
we talked about wolves,” she says.
“A few just like to put on a bonnet and chat.
“But most of them want to swallow you whole.
If that happens, try and relax. Think of other
things.
“Pretty soon you’ll hear Snip Snip and it’s light
again. You lie there while the woodsman says,
‘You’re all right now. Everything’s all right.’
“Well, you are and you aren’t. It is and it isn’t.
Don’t try to explain anything to a woodsman.”
Her daughter sighs. “Mom, I know all that,
okay? I’m not a baby.”
The mother looks toward the forest.
She remembers the size of him, the mystery.
“Plenty of time,” he said. “No hurry at all.
“Even the fireflies aren’t out yet and you’re
so beautiful in this light.”
T.J. Smith
Apologia as Deadbeat Grandfather
Lake City, 1975
I’m leaving because I want to,
because I can.
The back door stays
unlocked, and in any case,
I’ve got the key.
Don’t blame drinking.
I didn’t have to leave
to do that, throwing back
screwdrivers behind my eyes
each morning
until all the orchards in Florida
froze over. Then every day
was Christmas,
was disappointing as Christmas.
It’s not that I don’t love,
or even that I don’t love you,
though you won’t ask that.
It’s that the world won’t stop turning.
Whatever circuit
in my head misfires
is going to be in your head too.
That’s the only reason
I’m thinking this. I don’t owe you
explanation, or a name, or anything
the court doesn’t demand.
So, this is it then,
the back door left
unlatched. One day
I’m alive. You’re sorry.
You’re welcome.
T.J. Smith
Southern Gothic
I’m trying to remember
his face at the last birthday,
all Spanish moss and humidity,
how I’m always afraid
of the biting red we whisper
but have never felt. He’s far away
at the table’s head and Laura,
surprised to be celebrating her own birthday,
is visiting my mother at its end
until his voice, a thunderous blank,
recalls her. In months, the narrative
locks its beartrap jaws around them.
She kicks him out, the sky splits open
into light and sound, and it’s his son
who finds him hanging in the yard
out front. Why is this all so easy
to imagine when my mother tells it
on the phone? The silhouette
clearer than the face I saw so often
growing up, gray moss
on the living southern oak.
T.J. Smith
The Truth
Everyone’s put a hand on it now, the red SUV
next to the fountain in the mall. The men
on the radio, the men on TV report
the whole thing. It’s not a question
of righteousness but persistence.
My palm pressed flat above the rear left tire.
All around me, the people I started out with
fall away one after another. I can hear them
behind me, their laughter, their ice water from plastic cups,
It’s hard not to consider alternatives.
Talk is going around now about a time share
for the remaining competitors, some system
of taking turns with it, but no one believes
that this can ever work.
To be honest, I don’t know where I’m going,
where I would go if I could call it mine,
the quiet park I visited as a child,
the credit union where my debt is undisputed,
the doorway of my frustrated infatuation,
the church that closes its doors to me,
the graveyard where the suicides are buried,
past it, down the winding highway
the first-growth forest of oak,
the long-imagined summit beyond the clouds,
the sea. Yes,
I think I’d drive it to the sea,
I’d get no farther than I’ve walked before.
I’m still not ready to let go.
I see the distorted faces reflected in candy apple red,
their sweaty hands primed to commandeer the vessel
and send it pummeling full-speed through the gathered crowd.
Ron Koertge, a fixture in the Los Angeles poetry scene, loves to handicap thoroughbred race horses and can be found regularly around the paddock at Santa Anita Race Track. He has the usual array of prizes and awards and poems pending. Modesty prevents him from listing them.
T.J. Smith is a poet and educator in New York. Originally from Jacksonville, FL, he studied German and Creative Writing at Princeton, and he’s currently completing an MFA at NYU, where he’s the Web Editor of Washington Square Review. Recently his work has appeared in Cheat River Review, The Southampton Review, and Ilanot Review, among others.
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