MAGICIAN
The old man lifted himself from the chrome wheel chair and stood bravely before the audience. He waved a red bandana in the air, spun around three times, and slid into a pair of hiking boots. We could hear his leather belt mooing beside the scuff marks on the rubber soles. Slowly his wool slacks floated to the floor covering a herd of tiny sheep hooves. We watched the fibers of his white shirt flow like sunlight through the window out onto the cotton fields across the highway. Buttons rolled to the corners of the stage.
“He must have been a nudist” we said as we left the auditorium applauding wildly.
Outside, a dirty parking lot kept ejecting sports cars into the speeding highway
Some of us peered in through the side windows and noticed the magician’s watch dangling from a bird’s nest
It was still ticking and a few light rays kept bouncing off a jumbled pile of medals lying on a practice putting green
SACRED SPOON
A single silver spoon lay untouched
On a coffee table in South Omaha
At my grandmother’s house
Stolen – she claimed – from Edmund Spenser’s
Irish castle before it was torched
Wrapped in flannel
Carried aboard a ship
Bound for Nebraska
Via the Brooklyn Bridge
The ice cream & cookies & cake
Were great at Birthday Parties
But what made her think
We wanted oat meal & old bananas
Which would always taste
Like a rotting potato from Ireland
SUSAN LIKED TO DANCE
In her orange & green cheer leader outfit
Out on the side of the highway
Rouged
Jeweled
Fearless in the onrush
Of million dollar RV’s
Porsches
Unmarked ambulances
& motorcycles
She enjoyed the wind rush
Of a Harley zipping by at 80
I received a phone call
From her in the ER last night
I don't know what I'm going to do
Me Neither I whispered
Bionote
John McKernan is now a retired comma herder / Phonics Coach after teaching 42 years at Marshall University. He lives – mostly – in Florida. His most recent book is a selected poems Resurrection of the Dust. He has published poems in The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Journal, Antioch Review, Guernica, Field and many other magazines
No comments:
Post a Comment