Andrew Collard
Pax Americana
A hanging bulb swings almost imperceptibly
in its own light, varying the shadows, if barely, in the corners
of my uncle’s empty kitchen after class. No scent
of butter melted in the saucepan, no strayed shout intended
for the TV, and the ballgame being played mere miles
behind it through the wall, could make that sweatbox seem
any more inhabited than others down the street,
each one the same: the carpets immaculately clean, the quiet
scent of dryer sheets meandering up the stairway,
and stashed on the living room’s least conspicuous wall, a print
of praying hands. In someone else’s home, every provision
requires clearance, lying first beyond my reach, and then
beyond my will, and twenty years will pass before I learn
the sense of heaviness this isolation brings me, this tenor
of a scar, in other tongues, is known as loneliness.
There’s a distance, here, encoded in the space between
the houses, in the route the cops take, circling the block,
in the pixelated faces—the ones who got away—
captured on the backs of emptied cartons in the bin,
as though the neighborhood, itself, were whispering, forget.
Forget the nightly grate and whistle of the 4:30 train,
its blue-coated conductors so impatient for Chicago,
and the passengers made faceless by their haste. Forget
the rails, those rusted bones loosed from the flattened gravel
a thousand engines trusted they would cling to, and the wires
still strung beside that track for miles to either shore. Forget
the smokestacks towering above them, spouting shrouds of steam,
the unsettled surface of the river, and the peace
that hides beneath, waiting to ascend, to lay this block
and all that its constructions might illuminate to waste.
Pax Americana
A hanging bulb swings almost imperceptibly
in its own light, varying the shadows, if barely, in the corners
of my uncle’s empty kitchen after class. No scent
of butter melted in the saucepan, no strayed shout intended
for the TV, and the ballgame being played mere miles
behind it through the wall, could make that sweatbox seem
any more inhabited than others down the street,
each one the same: the carpets immaculately clean, the quiet
scent of dryer sheets meandering up the stairway,
and stashed on the living room’s least conspicuous wall, a print
of praying hands. In someone else’s home, every provision
requires clearance, lying first beyond my reach, and then
beyond my will, and twenty years will pass before I learn
the sense of heaviness this isolation brings me, this tenor
of a scar, in other tongues, is known as loneliness.
There’s a distance, here, encoded in the space between
the houses, in the route the cops take, circling the block,
in the pixelated faces—the ones who got away—
captured on the backs of emptied cartons in the bin,
as though the neighborhood, itself, were whispering, forget.
Forget the nightly grate and whistle of the 4:30 train,
its blue-coated conductors so impatient for Chicago,
and the passengers made faceless by their haste. Forget
the rails, those rusted bones loosed from the flattened gravel
a thousand engines trusted they would cling to, and the wires
still strung beside that track for miles to either shore. Forget
the smokestacks towering above them, spouting shrouds of steam,
the unsettled surface of the river, and the peace
that hides beneath, waiting to ascend, to lay this block
and all that its constructions might illuminate to waste.
Andrew Collard lives in Kalamazoo, MI, where he attends grad school and teaches. His poems can be found in Ploughshares, Sixth Finch, and Crazyhorse, among other journals.