Written from Row 14, Seat B
I feel sorry for the flight attendants, how dutifully
they try to prepare us for disaster by pointing here,
and here, and pulling on the loose end of the strap
like so. They say the nearest exit may be behind us
and that hits so profoundly true that I start crying.
Oxygen will be flowing to the mask even if the bag
does not inflate. And always secure your own first.
To hell with those requiring assistance, understood?
I nod to let them know that I, too, can be iron-hearted.
I then learn the life vest’s secret, how it’s hidden beneath
my seat, and how to inflate it, too, but never in the cabin,
which makes me then want to so bad. I imagine swelling
a balloon to fully fill a room. My cushion, as a bonus,
may serve as a flotation device. I look around at everyone,
their ears plugged. When we splash into waves, I’ll bob
among the last of the flight’s inattentive, thrashing.
~
For 718 N. Patrick
I broke my glasses today, so I’m writing this blind,
writing by feel, as it were, trusting my tapping fingers
to know the way over the river and through the woods
of November’s snowy drifts. My grandmothers are gone,
one before I was born, the other eighteen years ago.
The one I knew is buried in Erath County, the proclaimed
Cowboy Capital of the World. Bandera, two hundred
miles to the south, claims to be it, too. One has to be wrong.
Grandma wouldn’t have cared. She was a painter
of fields and flowers, and of fields full of flowers.
Wranglers never crossed her frames. Near the end,
when all of her was as feeble as her eyes, she willed
away each canvas with a name on yellowing tape.
Dad got my favorite: her house, softened by rare snow.
~
This Ends with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless
Pissed for no reason that I can now recall,
I once locked myself into the only bathroom
in the house. This was at Christmas, at a party.
With me, I brought a tallboy sixer of lager and
my anger. This was in grad school thirty years
ago, back when I still expended silent rages
freely. I remember the kicking and the banging
on the door, the shouting. Meanwhile, I drank
all my bottles on the can. (Where did everyone
piss? In the night’s snow? This was Buffalo.)
Eventually, I woke muzzy in the tub, addled,
and when I finally emerged, my friends had left
for me a world of butts and sour empties. And
on the turntable wheeled a record, silenced.
~
Kevin Grauke has published poems in The Threepenny Review, The Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Ninth Letter, and The Louisville Review, amongst others. He is the author of the short-story collections Shadows of Men and West of Destry, and a third short-story collection, Bullies & Cowards, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. He has an MFA from Texas State University and now teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia.