The Day Evening Didn’t Come
There never was shade in our neighborhood.
We got up from naps in the afternoon
and the streets were mirage.
Cars melted in their tracks,
occupants stood on hoods and cuffed their jeans,
tar boiling hot.
The mirror tint of their sunglasses
streaked down their cheeks,
gobbed in ugly silver clumps on their collars.
They implored us with frantic hand signals
across smoldering grass and bushes
to open the spigots of our hoses.
When evening didn’t come
we climbed on top of our roofs
with beach umbrellas
and counted plumes of smoke.
Someone shouted
to turn off all the radios.
We dabbed with handkerchiefs
at the sweat on our brows
and paid some local kids a couple bucks
to clean the ash accumulating on our windows
with old newspapers.
~
The Milk Pond
It used to be as easy as worms—
wake up before dawn, get your knees dirty.
Some days it took longer than others,
but even if you ended with vertigo,
bloodied fingers,
in the hospital emergency room
waiting for a tetanus shot,
when you spread it all out
on the proverbial table, your girlfriend
or buddy would help you sift through it,
rearrange shapes into words,
words into animals, animals into a forest,
the forest into a fable living outside your window
where you go to find goose eggs
and milk guarded by blue jays, follow
the whistling of the boy
who lives inside a turtle
to a tire tied to a rope and swing
into the pond where you see
at the bottom a rock
and take from beneath it a key.
James Fleet Underwood writes about memory, loss, and the texture of everyday life, much of it from the saddle of a fat old mountain bike. His work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Porch Lit Mag, Stink Eye, Beatnik Cowboy, and Blood and Honey.
