Going Away
“Six months is a long time,” Fred says
at our last lunch together before I go abroad.
He says that one of his poetry books
is being translated and published in France
and they might even fly him out to Paris
which would be great because he really wants to do
more traveling himself.
He’s decided to wait another three years before retiring
at 75, that he just got a raise, and besides, they need him
at the machine shop until they can hire someone
new to do the tasks that only he knows how.
It’s a warm January on the coast,
and Fred drinks a cold beer,
his red and white Hawaiian shirt
complemented by sunshine
and the beach behind him.
In two weeks, his wife Joan will email me frantically
in the middle of the night,
my bags half-packed,
to tell me Fred is dead.
But that’s still in the future
and we’re here now,
sitting on the patio of the Belmont Brewing Company
thinking six months is a long time.
*
Monument to the Soviet Army, Sofia
I’ve always admired how someone
built a half-pipe
in front of the old Soviet army monument,
with its towering soldier
raising his rifle to former glory,
surrounded by a Bulgarian man
and a woman with her child.
A place where teenagers could gather
to ride skateboards and bikes
instead of praising the past,
eat sandwiches while sitting on the base,
feet dangling over the bronze reliefs
depicting more scenes of glory
with more soldiers
that in recent times
have been painted by artists
to look like superheroes
or Ronald McDonald
or Santa Claus, and more recently
the blue and yellow national
colors of Ukraine.
Two years ago, the city decided
to dismantle the monument
despite its symbolic power
already diminished,
the figures on the pedestal removed
and put in a Socialist graveyard,
the base fenced off
and covered by scaffolds,
where around it today
I notice they’ve built
a winter skating rink
for parents and children
to hold hands
and laugh and glide
over the ice.
*
Clint Margrave is the author of the poetry collections Salute the Wreckage, The Early Death of Men, and most recently, Visitor, all from NYQ Books. He is also the author of the novel Lying Bastard and editor of Requiem for the Toad: Selected Poems of Gerald Locklin (NYQ Books). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Sun, Rattle, and B O D Y, among others. In 2024-2025, he served as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar to Bulgaria, living in Sofia, and teaching creative writing at Sofia University. He lives in Long Beach, California.
both of these poems explore our relationship to time with such potency, as if two moments in a timline are folded on themselves, and for a moment can glimpse each other. thank you, Clint
Clint, my friend, you have me crying in my coffee.
Wow. Powerful poems.