A L O R T O L A N I | Monsoon 2014
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Waiting for Word on a Friend’s Health
on a Night with Crepe Myrtle Nothing else is fired with bloom in August, except the memory I have of you tossing a baseball high into Sander’s elm, ricocheting, the ball drops unseen through the branches to an outfield of boys below, each vying to make the catch, searching the branches, the leaves, the round shadow-- circling under the ball by sound alone. And now this cell phone erupts, blinds me in the darkness, it’s blue screen brighter than the moon, the myrtle-- the blood inside an eardrum. Opium 3 p.m. Rain hangs over Cherokee County. A boy with a sleeveless shirt steps from the weight room, swaggers easily across the parking lot, his arms pumped like two clouds. Far to the south the tree line is held in mist. The rolling hills fold one layer over the next. A school bus chugs up the blacktop, a face in each window, peering into the woods, the tangled weekend, vines and bracken, stories told to frighten children. 3 a.m. The cool air eases into the room like the suggestion of sex, erotic as the poppy’s paste—the night’s funk, feral as a deer, buck in the sumac, rut-felt, antler velvet. A light in the back bedroom—he reads Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury. A motorcycle on Rouse, a faraway train—the quiet trees spread like umbrellas on the lawn. Indian summer—moths tap the screen, resin-coated wings beating wire mesh, the flashing cherries of the police a mile out on Highway 7. * |
Al Ortolani’s poetry and reviews have appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Word Riot, and the New York Quarterly. He has four books of poetry, The Last Hippie of Camp 50 and Finding the Edge, published by Woodley Press at Washburn University, Wren's House, published by Coal City Press in Lawrence, Kansas, and Cooking Chili on the Day of the Dead from Aldrich Press in Torrance, California. His fifth book, Waving Mustard in Surrender, will be released by New York Quarterly Books later in 2014. He is on the Board of Directors of the Kansas City Writers Place and is an editor with The Little Balkans Review.
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