When the city I loved was taken away from me,
the row houses and tenements burst into mourning.
The forsythia wouldn’t bloom. It refused.
Citizens marched down the street asking the sunrise to rise over them.
Oh, it was darkness. It was darker than darkness.
Like the inside of a combustion engine.
Like when you’re sleeping alone at a Holiday Inn.
My life like the mathematical formula I’d held under water until it finally conceded.
Consider lovemaking, or maybe my neighbors’ lovemaking downstairs.
There was a movie someone made that was set in the 70s, where these couples put their keys into a bowl,
then they found out what lovemaking really means.
It’s a spectacle. And an awkward gesture with arms and opening throats. Always and entirely too much.
And saying too much sometimes.
It’s the only way to keep being in love safe.
All that darkness. Like hands moving everywhere over everything.
About This Poem:
“I have a long relationship with the city of St. Louis. It was where core parts of my childhood took place. It was where I returned after I was discharged from the Navy. Moving away for grad school has always felt like the city was taken away from me. And the poem really just dwells on that darkness for a while. Then it leads to my utter fear I’m going to be tricked into a key party, like in that Ang Lee movie, The Ice Storm.”
About The Poet:
Kent Shaw’s second book, Too Numerous, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry and was published by University of Massachusetts Press. His work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Lana Turner, Oversound, Couplet, and Bathhouse Journal. He teaches at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and he blogs about poetry at thekalliope.org.
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