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Three Poems

By Matthew Stepanic

Still Running

  • Post-date & still aflutter, midnight,
  • I skip up an emptied High Street.
  • A man races down in a white pick-up,
  • hollers, “Nice purse, faggot,”
  • & I start running posthaste.
  • Later, I quip: “If he had slowed down,
  • I could have told him where I got it.”
  • The joke conceals my fear:
  • “If he had slowed down—”
  • Our existence is fear. It has coded rules
  • in our blood—which we cannot share
  • because other fears eclipse ours—
  • stand straighter, touch later.
  • Our tongues are weighted to hold down truths,
  • our legs ever alert, and our endurance
  • innumerable years long.
  • Every time a man yells from a truck,
  • he raises with gravel a question:
  • what triggers a person to hate
  • the sight of two kissing
  • who needs to own a rifle that could
  • make Swiss cheese of a deer
  • is tonight the night
  • a man walks into this gay bar
  • & gunfire is mistaken for reggae?
  • As people crawl over those who are finally
  • done their race, a nightclub tweets:
  • “Everyone get out of Pulse and keep running.”
  • I am still running. We are still running.
  • We are still—

 Pianist Rising

  • Does your stomach still sink with each
  • footclimb to the stage as it did when it scraped
  • the ground on the Mach 3
  • (whose seats flip on the tips of
  • rotating 100-foot arms—
  • buckled in, we kiss in a moment
  • the stars and the stones)?
  • Before you join your partner,
  • you’ve trowelled confidence over
  • every fault in your face.
  • You sit before the maw of the piano;
  • your hands descend and ascend over molars,
  • filling cavities in air pockets and eardrums,
  • collaborating with each tone of the audience’s heart.
  • A language more riddle than love—
  • universally understood but not universally spoken.
  • (You told me once: there are more notes
  • than fit on the 12-tone scale,
  • and I wondered if I could say what I needed to with a few extra letters.)
  • You usher emotion from the singer’s throat,
  • summoning now flight, now sorrow, now serenity.
  • Each hollow note is paired or
  • partnered above the stage, lifted
  • where we were lifted on the Mach 3.
  • (Pitches escaped my throat at heights
  • I could not have reached before.
  • A risk I’d never take on my own, unless
  • I trusted you’d laid out notes as a net to catch us.
  • You corrected me once: the term
  • is collaborative pianist.
  • Do the pianist and the singer not
  • share the same success?)
  • Accompany cannot encompass
  • your place on any stage.
  • For even in my best-laid plans, the Ferris wheel
  • turns us into the sky, turns us back to the ground.
  • We exit as the fireworks begin above.

 Later, You Return a Book

  • Months later,
  • you tell me you’re reading
  • a book I recommended and my heart returns to
  • months before.
  • I had cast a line of Siken,
  • a charm to keep you:
  • It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
  • it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio.
  • You said, You’ll realize soon how
  • significant trees are in my life,
  • and I believed you bewitched.
  • You’ve yet to return my anthology of Alice Munro.
  • I worry if there will even be space
  • for it on my bookshelf.
  • I imagine I am in one of her stories:
  • I dated a man once. Decades later,
  • he volunteers to drive me back to town.
  • I married him, or
  • I realized it hardly mattered.

Photo by Flickr user Atomic Taco

Read more

  • Matthew Stepanic
  • Issue 140
  • Poetry

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