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Jeffrey Alfier - Aguila, Arizona |
This landscape is littered with spent omens.
The day you were born, passenger trains quit:
towns of four hundred were unworthy stops.
These are things you can’t explain to lovers
when back roads are dark islands in sad towns.
You fight the awkward dryness of your lips
as you taste the softness behind her neck,
strong as the soil that welds your sweat to plows
year in and year out, all for bragging rights
for one more round of cantaloupe harvests.
Tears of women you should have never known
will burn like spindrift when you turn away.
As dawn drifts across McMullen Valley
you wake in a strange house, but lie silent,
hearing footsteps creak against old floorboards
the way tree limbs in the dark used to say
the time has come to cut the hanged man down.
Jeffrey Alfier is a technical writer living in Bechhofen, Germany. He formerly served as an adjunct faculty member with City Colleges of Chicago's European Division. Publication credits include A Time of Trial (Hidden Brook Press, 2002), The Adirondack Review, Border Senses, Columbia Review, Penumbra, Poetry Greece, Stolen Island Review, The Richmond Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.
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