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Jamaal May Page 3 Coming Back for You
Tonight the tide
will stretch out. Syringes
and splinters of
glass will be collected.
Shells and
stones that aren’t needed
until morning
will be left cleaving beach.
You’ll forget
that sound in a month
then remember it
on a runway waiting
for your ears to
pop. In Pittsburgh
a vat overflows
and scalds a foundryman
while a young
chef somewhere smothers
a fire because
she lost control of it.
In a backyard, a
boy learns a boomerang
doesn’t come
back to you, only your location;
if you should be
elsewhere when I return
I may be lost,
twirling out of view, while
exhaust hurries
from a bus in Michigan
hurrying a
bouquet of passengers from an airport
to the missed.
An arm scratched red.
A zippered pouch
full of cures. An addict
who can’t stop
picking at his face
rolls a scab
between fingers
for the
remainder of the trip. You watch him
while stroking a
cowry on the necklace I strung
in Oregon. A
pair of teenagers too frightened
to head home
fall asleep watching dawn,
the Pacific
comes ashore to reclaim a hermit crab
finding only the
shell, immovable where it rests.
© Copyright, 2013,
Jamaal May. |