The Stopwatch Gene
My father becomes gears
and during one of his
carefully scheduled visits
he whispers that
I’ll inherit the clocks
plus his short-listed days,
the ripples in the river,
trees wearing trench coats
in heavy Colorado snow.
This without any
particular brokenness
in his tone and a cold
downtown deserted,
nothing too early except
in our expectations
of a difficult talk, maybe
late into the night, while
raccoons spill a trash can
and we pretend
to not hear a thing.
*
Puddles
The air tasted like pennies
the rainy day I realized
blueberries are purple
and we weren’t gonna work.
Before that, we drove on thin roads
to rage rooms, where
sledgehammers could not help us.
Glass everywhere a reminder
of the present-past and how
we planted roses in random fields
only to occasionally drive by
and watch their various stages of wilt.
Someone must have tooth-picked
our air hoses — maybe us.
Maybe we are why the elixir is missing
from the liquor cabinet:
Our pathology inexact and the only things
we do know is both of our stethoscopes
were broken in a crash; we’ve been
kissing through a glass door.
The dogs ate our steak.
The path around the side of our house
circles back to the front. Inside the kids
are growing so quick and
the mouse trap is missing its marble.
Only a theophany can save us now,
our origin untethered from consequence,
a bright light from the sky
as our fragments get multiplied,
and again by zero, the fresh-cut trees
blessing an axe, the vines creeping
up our fence, lighting up, blowing
smoke rings, trying to tell us something.
Even our couches are sad. Our smart phones
turned anger lines. Our kids, adhesive.
Our hands meaning well but caught
in bicycle spokes, glistening with blood
under perceived sun so hot
it could melt us on the pavement
as the whole neighborhood watched.
*
KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first four collections of poems are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.
