Elegy for 1990
A murder of five echoed the muddy rush refusing my skinny oak arms, pop cans and cardboard scarves scolding my hand. A barge chewed the center current, a brown rat piloting an empty gallon jug in its wake. I asked the crows, Why am I here? Five eyes rolled north as the rat tacked the bend, two nude men on the west bank holding hands and a spittoon, a third waving his ballcap like a lighthouse beam I’d dreamed before my uncle’s truck caressed the cliff, the river unwilling to touch him too, yellow pansies exciting the hillside he descended. A crow set a petal on the rock beside me and waited.
Ben Kline (he/him/his) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, host of Poetry Afield and Poetry Stacked, Ben is a poet and storyteller whose work appears in bedfellows magazine, Pangyrus Lit, South Carolina Review, Pigeon Pages, Poetry, Southeast Review, Autofocus, fourteen poems, and many other publications.
