Living
would be easier if our hearts
were local burger joints
and someone cemented
screaming red safety poles
of reinforced steel in front of
our drive-thru windows
so if any beautiful hooligans
rumbling straight out of American Graffiti
in their classic chrome-plated
mischief swerved drunkenly
at us on a bleary August night
of barbed stars strung in careless
garlands around the sullen moon,
they would smash the poles,
damaging themselves, not us.
Think if nurses planted ranks
of blunt red poles around
the squirming pink newborns
in nurseries to bang back
the wrecking ball hands of gathering
adults: or planets twirling
a blurred gallery of warning poles
arrayed on the pure parabolas
of their translucent rings,
every peeping satellite caroming
harmlessly off into pockets
of soundless darkness like sloppy
bumper pool shots aimed at mysteries,
better left unknown. Or all those
European ships, wooden hulls
stoved in, staked like rare beetles
on miles of bright industrial poles
along coastal New England,
American tribes gazing
through the lush green bracken
with satisfaction at the rotten collection
baking in brutal sun
like a science lesson about
the invasions lurking in every discovery.
But if you had stayed
behind your red defenses
when I wheeled
a woozy U-turn your way, my thoughts
a hackneyed movie script, a throb
of history glossing my throat,
we wouldn’t now whir
at a low hum, as standard as
the ventilation unit bolted behind
warehouses or sleepy clinics,
unguarded, beyond replacement,
running for years like a conversation,
both people leaning in closer
as if to repeat what the other is saying.
— Matthew James Babcock
Matthew James Babcock is the author of Four Tales of Troubled Love (fiction), Heterodoxologies (nonfiction), Points of Reference (poetry), Strange Terrain (poetry), and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis (criticism). His awards include the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, the AML Poetry Award, the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction, and Winner of Press 53’s Open Awards Anthology Prize for his novella, “He Wanted to be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker.” In 2022, he was Arthur Dolsen Visiting Writer at Idaho State University. He lives with his family in Rexburg.
