Bullhead City
Name it the hard-won art of not going home:
how sky umbers into failing light.
Into the scent of dust and memory,
of barren foothills brushstroked
in terra cotta and mirage.
Along Casino Drive I hear the dark elation
of someone buying dope in a shadowed doorway
and the laughter of a teen vaping
with the fervency of someone deprived of oxygen,
their lungs in search of restlessness.
Jaywalking tourists scuttle sideways over streets
and curbs, rushing to gamble under the gaining tide
of neon that apes the low red flame of roadside vigils —
the part of them that will leave no forwarding address,
streets meant to fall away behind them.
Others drift toward the musty aura
and muted corners of dive bars,
toward nightclubs that line Route 95,
the deadpan glamor of strippers
with names only fugitives would assume.
Like all mercy, those names beg to be used again
on men who wait for the torch singer
whose voice is ceaseless,
each soul leaning toward the same hunger,
the same light coming for our eyes.
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Jekyll Island Just Past Labor Day
The dormant shoreline you overnight on
is a season someplace next to lost.
Words lip-synch out of waking dreams. It’s just the past —
extinct phone numbers of lovers long moved on.
The early sun’s so pallid it’s a paraphrase of itself.
You rise, let fall the ground cloth you shared with solitude
Near the surf, an indrawn breath of littoral air,
the waters turbid with driftwood and seawrack.
Your mind drifts to the sound of breakers,
foul mouths of seabirds, mottled wings fixed on hunger.
A hugging couple who’d slept upshore, free their embrace
so slowly you think love can do no more for them.
Your eyes skim the eidolon of a masted ship
fringing the tide lightening at the edge of world.
On the esplanade above, the morning gains
in footfalls drawn-out in come-and-go-echoes.
Shoreward, a woman in a sunstruck cottage
turns her back to the window’s cresting and broken light.
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JC Alfier’s most recent book, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include The Emerson Review, Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. He is also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work, and is founder and co-editor of Blue Horse Press.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 