Strays Living near the Saint John’s River
My fathermark could be a drawbridge, slowly
raising over stillwater—splitting himself
for a beam and faded, inglorious flags.
Every wayward barge in the marsh
sidles-up drunk in the daytime—he scrubs
his head in a clawfoot washtub while Mozart
levitates Elise above a frozen pond.
Thomas Street neighborhood strays, the addicts
and wildcats, splay on his loveseats and rockers
as invisible X marks dot the mango-violet horizon.
First time I gathered her fuzzy, little
striped lump of a body in my rough palms,
she was all cough and bone. Tigress descendant,
puff with a knack-for-dozing under tables,
the royal kind of rare beast made for psalms
or rhymes. After a few, luxuriant
weeks of canned tuna and horse, we blew fat
as basketballs, slouched and lumbered
like buzzsaws humming lullabies
for the Lazarus cicadas.
Where we’re living now, people
disappear—die and get found.
Float
into Dope Moonlight
My greasy soliloquy bled like a fallen Gall
on the Battlefield Collage of our Inhumanity
where the tree of life repairs,
internally.
Beneath burning branches, corpsmen pray
over the bullet-split bodies of young sons
who float into dope moonlight—bloody
poets hear every guttural scream at once,
the ecstasy-cacophony. They lyric-die
inside the maple womb-bark.
Savage rapture descending hereafter,
unthinkable force containing each
fleck of us, give us any nameless place
amid the void—we will help orchestrate
the chaos necessary for creation.
We leave exactly how we arrived
on this dime-sized saltwater
marble of land and lava: bloody
and hearing all these nurses holler.
Forrest Rapier
has poetry forthcoming in Dead Mule, Levee, Whiskey Tit,
and West Trade Review. He has received fellowships from BOAAT,
Looking Glass Falls, Sewanee Writers Conference, and has also held writing
residencies at the University of Virginia and Brevard College. Former poetry
editor for Greensboro Review and North Carolina Writers Network, he
recently received his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
where he now lives and hikes the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains.