Two Poems
Johnathan Greenhuase
A Partial Accounting of Everything That’s Gone Wrong
Our flailing tongues get tripped up
upon a trail of yesterdays, the present a patchwork marriage
of our singular mistakes on display. Adept
in the art of echolocation
we bounce our words off each other’s bodies, swerve
from critiques we aren’t yet ready for, take
our pointed cues from bats
to hover just out of reach of whatever
would wound or adhere to us like truth, like spilled syrup
to a diner’s pleather booths. To focus on what’s
behind us, our heads are
haphazardly stuck up our butts, our perspectives
a bit crappy, our hair follicles hatching a plan with plumbers
to clog our bombarded drains,
our pained limbs methodically disengaging
like a crumbling empire’s failed artillery, our freewill
acting suspiciously like fate,
this list of ballooning transgressions growing too lengthy
for any one poem to incorporate.
Showered in Confetti
Imagine a solution so simple
it’ll only work on paper, like our child-rearing plans
before the baby’s born,
her piano lessons & contemporary ballet &
sword-swallowing: We’ll dull
the downward blade before she ingests, straighten
our daughter’s backbone,
her arched vertebrae a trembling tower
of building blocks,
her forced smile contagious. She’ll be equally
enamored with horses
& glue factories, pine for a bygone era
when their destinies
were laboriously stuck together, both the rider
& the writer, connection
& erasure. Hoofprints mark the hardening mud,
our suspect past decisions
wedding her present & future paths, carrying
all of us forward, our bodies
jasmine petals pressed against the earth, its scent
a sweet rot, our purpose
fulfilled. After gathering this dust of years,
we’ll patiently wait for her
to visit, her own daughter in tow, nursing homes
sprouting all around, a trail
of confetti showering us from our shredded plans.
Jonathan Greenhause’s first poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), was the winner of the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Bayou, The Fish Anthology, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Permafrost.