Polaroid
We’ve gone through the rooms together, assigned
this keepsake and that. Who knows what
we’ve missed, or overlooked, what’s lost
or forgotten, but at least I found the shoebox
stuffed with old photos. It has something
to do with angles, refraction, or angels
and reflection. The flash stabbed the paper,
left itself as a trail to follow, and we froze,
time-stamped. Now, I study these landscapes
that have retained us, startled
by our previous existence,
how for this little space of time
we are found, we are given back
our puzzled faces,
a thousand leaves of grass,
porch steps, a fence.
How the light overwhelms us.
~
What the Days Are For
I’ve latched onto this day,
with its impatient light,
standing by the cliff edge,
as if I could choose otherwise. Birds,
condors or hawks, circle on updrafts.
Below, the rivers work down
into the earth,
and though it takes a long time, and
though they spend eons at this task,
they reach earth, and more earth,
and more earth.
I am not here to survive anything.
~
Circling Juana
The course they’ve set at the bureau of 7‑day cruises
will take us around Cuba–
embargoed, mambo, ham radio, commie,
cinderblock, black beans and rice, Castro’s beard
Cuba–a faded nightclub of an island,
a busted chair of a country. Cuba Libre
twists like a waterspout out of the barrios,
every boy tastes the tall cane of open water,
plots the revenge of the powerless. Evening,
the pink fender of a ‘55 Cadillac,
eases around a corner. Flamingo-legged girls
yawn and flirt, unopened bottles of champagne,
patient as nuclear warheads pointed out
across the endless indifference of blue ocean, blue
and ruffled as parrot feathers. Dawn,
if it bothers to show up at all,
is the cloudy remains of the past,
seafoam on the beach, and history
is a raft of those who flee,
three little ships against the horizon.
Columbus’ ghost writes lies in his diary,
the sea at sundown
paved in gold, drowned in time.
~
Ho Chi Minh In Paris
He would recall fondly his days on the boulevards
when he drank good wine with the other cooks,
read Karl Marx, scribbled in his notebooks, shook out
breadcrumbs for the pigeons. Diplomats in top hats.
French whores. Lovers strolled by
while European cartographers drew boundaries
of a world fractured into pieces
like a cantaloupe. He thought–absurd and naïve,
he must have realized later–that in the white
men’s war his yellow-skinned pleading,
carefully translated, typed on official paper,
carried from the kitchen of the Hotel Ritz
along the Seine, would be granted.
Then he petitioned with guns, then, one
peasant by one, and village by village,
he composed a declaration across the bloodied,
napalmed face of his country
that even the sons of Wilson must read.
Many years later, his name became a path
through the jungle, a city of French
colonial architecture, worn, discolored,
unrepaired, and broad boulevards
where today you can find a little café
and pigeons feeding on crumbs
that fall from the tables like flakes of gold.
~
Gardenias
When the space aliens, who gave off
a particularly offensive odor, promised
not to blow up the planet,
the United Nations ambassadors all knelt.
The President read a poem
he wrote the night before about a galaxy
that believed it was a unicorn
running faster and faster
through a meadow of flowers,
though obviously he meant the universe,
not petunias or gardenias.
He was using a metaphor,
he told the alien emperor.
It turned out the alien emperor
could not pronounce gardenia.
It was humorous, you had to admit.
When somebody snickered,
they canceled the treaty.
So we have planted fields of flowers
across every continent.
The sky may be utterly empty now,
or the stars may be blocked from view
by a fleet of alien spaceships
pointing atomic lasers at the earth,
but nobody bothers
to look up anymore, and all you can smell
in the soft evening air is gardenias.
~
John Glowney’s poetry has appeared in Narrative, Iowa Review, Shenandoah, and many other journals; a full-length collection, Visitation (Broadstone Books, 2022); and a chapbook, Cold-Hearted Boys (Main Street Rag, July 2024). A new collection, A Fish Child’s Songbook, winner of Jacar Press’s full-length collection contest, will be published in 2026. A debut novel will be published in 2026. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest’s Richard Hugo Prize, and the Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. johnglowney.com