Jeff Calhoun

Your mother is spouting philosophy,
every word ever said about flight,
how even now you are levitating
inside her womb, a penguin with feathery dreams.

Notes scrawled at an adoption clinic

Eventually, you did it once
for the act, the sake of ceremony,
of watching, like banana slices
on the tip of a knife, how each twin
seemed to pause at the last moment,
unsure if the landscape was suitable.

Later, you and a glass of scotch
divulged the truth, how her mother
had cried the previous night,
how all your days are now cyclic:
hardened feet pressing against wooden stairs,
thoughts of never passing the family moniker,
dancing pills you crush into your wife's cereal.

Love found in darkened chambers

When we met, I was struck by your thinness,
how you seemed to be composed of wind,
the better to carry you above the minefields.
One night, you confided you had dreamt of escape,
though the physics of flak cannons grounded you.

In the few moments we were alone, we sat on gnarled rocks,
let the breeze, our only external comfort, wrap us.
You could smell the sulfur and it reminded you
that we haven't always been here. We survived
because we worked, you in the laundry,
me in the fields. The irony was not lost on us,
how I fed you along with the Nazis, how you clothed me
and learned to sew stars and swastikas.

We usually spoke of home, mothers caring for golabki
or Kreplach like food was sacred. The strategy
for survival was to avoid becoming disposable,
to offer something, a harvested field
or letting your mind steal away on the wind
as a soldier tore at your clean skirt.

We harbored thoughts of small rebellions,
razing a patch of wheat, rending a pair of grey trousers.
When I felt the air grow dense and yellow,
I curled grass into a ring and you slipped it on too willingly.
We consummated what little we had in a small room,
cylindrical and smelling of cast iron.
Finality was a refusal to succumb, a minute
but serious hope in our hips as something like chalk
spilled into the room. Skin poured like vodka over a mass grave.

Jeff Calhoun recently received a BS in Biology from the University of Dayton. He will soon begin a PhD program in biomedical science at the University of Michigan.

His writing credits include 2River View, Lily, Softblow, Poetry Midwest, Stirring, and Triplopia. His recent chapbook is freely available online from Lily Press and is entitled Navigating the Throes of Concrete Ravines. When he's not mining the human genome for patterns or found poems, he's probably dreaming about banana pancakes or chocolate milkshakes."

Donna Dixon "Ribbon Eater"

current - submissions - archives - contact us