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4 poems by Travis Campbell

7/5/2013

0 Comments

 
Picture
Good Metaphors 

You stare at me 
through an imaginary egg 
held between your thumb 
and middle finger.

Your face painted,
light ruby in eccentric light
that stains the fiction, 
the make-believe yolk, 
a human pink. 

Good metaphors
don’t need to be explained.
Good metaphors
don’t even need to be 
Good metaphors. 

The egg is a metaphor
you say but do not explain
as you leave it, 
balancing
on the nightstand. 

In the morning, 
My fingers search 
the empty canyon carved 
in the mattress, where your shape 
was indented softly 
by the rose hued comforter, 
carefully cast aside. 

A broken pink yolk,
sliding down the bedside,
running across the floor. 

Another Drive Home from Work 

An evening pool
is being dug deeper 
in the backyard 
of June sky and 
the cloudy-with-
a-chance-of-rain 
-workmen 
are dropping 
orange peels from 
their lunch pails
that burn like hot 
coals and then 
begin to sink 

in the new dusk, 
headlights on US 31
awaken from 
their day-long drowse 
and bring with them 
the roadside fireflies, 
and a new pulse 

of summoned stars
that shine bright
in growing black
like teeth in the nocturnal maw
that yawns a summer breeze
and exhales the smell of alfalfa 
into the open nostrils 
of homebound highway cars. 

Newport 

My foundation is napkins.
Melted butter soggy, easily

torn and sleeping through
these pretty New England

miles. And the gulls, with their
rusty swing calls, remind me

that like the first bologna
sandwich of summer, I am 

lazily assembled and unwel-
come, at this table of lobster tail 

and steamed red potatoes. 

Halogen 

Motorcycles on McGalliard
are lowing like injured cows,
under a purple pastoral 
of evening sky,

their solemn cries carrying
across parking lots,
and like cocktails, they mix 
in the drunken ears 
of bar hopping moths

Winged speckles, 
inebriated satellites
flailing from lamppost 
to lamppost
suckling light pollution,
out of the goodness 
in their hearts.

They eventually stumble
through an open bedroom window, 
to caress a bulb of atlantic blue, 
and have a seat 

on the shoulders of
a Saturday night shut-in 
where they impart
their wars stories 
about sadness and bats 
between hiccups, half hearted 
and staggering slurs. 

“They were inkblots
against the moon. 
Living Rorschach tests, 
that fashioned the fates
of our mothers, our brothers,
our daughters. 

Their sobbing 
drowned
in Harley engines 
like our sorrows 

in 90 proof halogen.”

photo credit: chotda via photopin cc
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