Issue 11: August 2007.
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Home > Issue 11: August 2007 > Longer Poetry
Old Roman's Row
by Brian Parkison
Roman catches fresh cut grass
thrown with damp earthworm in
the caves of his nose and his home
Cue fire-engine wails and flash
as Roman, hands spread and nose pressed flat
against his epic window, breathes
and leaves in dry finger-painted font
the melting image of a spear
(Roman sows flowers in the winter,
tender poinsettias at the edge of his lawn
just past first snow near the walk
he wraps up in hysterical layers,
then bundled in tight he waits—
rooted in his rocking-chair
he watches them die)
Roman hurdles his threshold’s black mat,
snagging with one hand his long, loose black coat
and absently straddling his front ditch-turned-moat
he slicks back his collar and
halts in his tracks
while he watches himself snarling up from the stream,
rude thick raindrops break his face and halo
out;
the smeared sky is a faucet,
Roman finds remote canals rising
quick as a sink unattended
Roman’s home lies on top of old earth
on past the gas station, a sunken corner, it
lurks, peering up, never blinking
its two skewed-wide eyes
as Roman boards his beaten brown Beetle
low to the ground around the corner he goes
toward the cinder-block blender,
the university and fire trucks, he follows the sound
as they start to wind down, then
after seconds of silence
they pick up the downpour outside
both his doors
The dormitory’s twenty stories all out on the lawn
boxed-in, bomb squad, blue-red brown;
the sky, his eyes, the gutters backed up
and the swarm keeping warm with umbrellas and
bright coats, they cram all together
at the brink of the road, standing back from the brick-bottomed
buildings; it rains
Roman watches oceans form faster by the minute,
parked down the way playing
Suffragette City
then the firetruck moves.
Roman throws forth his
transport and
strikes
Water pooled reaches half past his right tires
tickling the underbelly of his
automobile. Roman delves in a line along
the curb through the sea;
triggered tidal waves rise reaching
up for the skies like
the jaws of a great cocoa free-flowing creature
and envelop the ones in the front
and drench the ones back from that
and make obsolete nearly fifty feet of coats, umbrellas, and hats.
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