Three Minutes

Surgeons for the Jacobite     s and English at Culloden,
needed three minutes to h     ack through a trashed arm.
Time enough to jam econ     o with the Minutemen, or
for a determined girl to e     mpty Scotland—rock after
rock (thrown into a meta     l-shaded loch), her youthful
act of dispossession. Thr     ee minutes’ll find a cat pet
into annoyance, or green     tea steeped to a soundless
balance. In the time it ta     kes the doctor to grit his te-
eth and dig in, a thoroug     hbred could gallop a medi-
ocre lap at Belmont, or a     n artist draw a circle so p-
erfect it would generate i    ts own loneliness. Black
holes came clear to Haw     king within the lost langu-
age of a three-minute kis     s. The arm’s soft albumen
has little to say in the par     ting. It’s in bone, those th-
ree minutes, the length of    heaven, a humming-bird
’s side-ways glance, their    wings beating out epochs.
It’s ample time for death     to turn our dead eyes into
snow globes, or the brea     k-up window scene, where
all she can think is, I’m      free of you and that’s why
I cry. The waste of the t     rain of the arm taken off t-
oo soon.

FRED DALE is a husband to his wife, Valerie, and a father to his occasionally good dog, Earl. He is a Senior Instructor in the English Department at the University of North Florida. He earned his MFA at the University of Tampa, but mostly, he just grades papers. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Summerset Review, Crack the Spine, Chiron Review, The Evansville Review and others.

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