Poetry
So, in the swirl of carbon, you feel things
like your eyes dusted by hibiscus thistle
ear errors corrected by a finer tuning of strings.
So isn’t it miraculous such a dish serves itself
while you just sweep the hose through backlit air
defining air as you go, hopping gardens, cooking
eating, singing, inching toward exquisite this
and that, in a carbon swirl that meets
you face to face as a caricature of yourself,
weird and honest with no part missing
but unfulfilled longing for it or her or that
my god, the rails I’m on that take me daily
down the swirl of those cyclone walls, the fields
below me my boredom, the winds, bedframes
broken towns my distracted thoughts as I drop
into another frozen room. They say it sounds
like a freight train, longing, exploding from wood.
Lawrence Bridges’s poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums, Flip Days, and Brownwood with Red Hen Press.