THREE POEMS BY JOE FLETCHER



          Drinking Song



          It's summer and a rash
          swarms across our skin.
          I suck from an infant's shirt
          soaked in a bitter infusion—
          part of a drinking game

          and prelude to our drinking
          song, this coterie I'm in
          with nothing to atone for
          but our selves. We run
          to the lightning-gashed elm.

          We look to the patriarch.
          Even when we don't look
          to the patriarch, we look
          to the patriarch. He's livid.
          We feel him as we drink.

          The thaw has flooded the earth.
          An otter rots in a river snag.
          Night sky doubles down
          in my drinking bowl, into which
          I dip two fingers of my drinking hand.

          Frigid broth. But it goes down
          and scours my innards so I'm clean,
          eager to be changed by it.
          Mist coats a dormant backhoe.
          Who says the elm doesn't hurt?

          It's trying to hide in its own shadow. I run
          my drinking hand along its scarred trunk.
          It's not drinking. We are. It distracts us
          until the song begins and the patriarch comes
          from wherever, he with the lidless eye.

          We're patient, which is a kind of impatience.
          We find a boy asleep by a stringer of trout.
          We decide not to wake him.
          He's grinding his teeth.
          Like the grinding of gears as the backhoe

          rumbles awake to scoop out more reservoir.
          So we can drink. We line up with our bowls.
          Night passes quickly this way. I smell
          the river in the hot morning, all of us
          dragging our wounds into the sun.


          Life Jacket


          We were children.
          A storm pressed against the lush
          summer air and gathered over the lake,
          which darkened above its trenches,
          glazing to a deep emerald in places,
          indicating a bottom tangled thick with weeds,
          caught in which were the remnants of the drowned,
          whose harrowing stories had been told to us
          in the stern voices of adults before we ventured,
          our legs still chubby around the knees, into
          the unknown zones beyond the sand-rippled shallows.
          My neck was constricted by the life jacket, which
          smelled of compressed sunshine and the acrid stench of lake
          into which motors and men have dribbled their offal.
          I had—for the first time—no ground beneath my feet.
          A kind of joy seized me, but a joy
          compacted with vertigo. I wasn't free.
          My legs dangled, pale and vulnerable,
          in muddy vagueness, and I feared some Leviathan
          would rise and brush its nakedness against mine,
          or that my kicking feet would knock against
          the cabin of a rusted tug, or an algae-slimed chain
          connecting something heavy and dead to something
          heavy and dead. I entered strange pockets of cold,
          as if I were treading above a chasm from which
          nightmares leaked into the world. I felt prey to currents
          and winds that could bury me beneath a whitecap.
          A storm was coming, obscuring the distance in its fury.
          Boats were hastily moored and abandoned.
          Swimmers scurried ashore, wringing
          ropes of tepid water from their soggy trunks.
          Gulls retreated screaming to boathouse eaves.
          We gathered on the shore's pavilions, charcoal grills
          were wheeled beneath roofs, and soon meat was sizzling.
          I liked it there, pressed against the others in relief.
          We all watched the lake: for moments it was calm.
          A volleyball to which a few grass clippings were stuck
          floated out past the docks, into the smooth liquid open.
          Then lightning leapt from a bruised cloud and tore the air
          into jagged, trembling planes. I lost sight of the ball
          in the thrashing that followed.



          A Night Out


          Smothered moon.
          Leafless season—
          stars drift through winter ink.
          In night-thickened pastures I hear a snorting.
          A crick trickles among ice-skirted stones.
          I taste my teeth—hot, like lightning-blasted rock.
          I migrate along magnetic seams,
          the corolla of my veins ticking in my loins.
          The city is briefly eclipsed as I pass
          through a boxwood grove. No sap
          tumbles through those chilled fibers.

          A murmuring finds its hearer in me.
          I follow it deep into a building.
          It's a funeral. Whose? I partake.
          In torchlight I see something dark scurrying
          around our ankles. A woman passes
          ladling drink from I don't know what reserves.
          It goes through me like a hornet swarm.
          A priest slurs through a prayer.
          The coffin. From what enormous ash was it hacked?
          We approach and tip it down a gleaming rail
          into gloom and the sound of gurgling pumps.
          We disperse.

          I climb back to the roadscar glinting with minerals,
          slicing between dirty snowbanks.
          How to compensate for this loss?
          I inhale a harsh air.
          My sinews are fraught with borrowed light.


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Joe Fletcher's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry International, jubilat, Slope, Octopus, Pebble Lake Review, Hollins Critic, Hoboeye, and elsewhere.


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