The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. From The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
An award-winning teacher, Josh A. Brewer has taught writing at Purdue, U of Miami, South Carolina, Tennessee State, Ivy Tech, and Aquinas College. His work appears in Poetry Quarterly, Harvard Rev., Southeast Rev., Natural Bridge, RHINO, Booth, Yemassee, and Sargasso. His books are Writers Resist (2017) and When is a Will (2022).
Welcome to the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Josh, what poems have you brought for us today?
1.
Roll Jordon
Jordon was in the backseat with me,
out on the night of her majority.
Dane drives us through the dark cemetery,
passing time or passing out, and blink—
black go the headlights.
We roll smack into a gravestone,
hear it scrape the length of the undercarriage and muffler,
and Jeremy gets out, says it’s broken.
“The car?” No. All good.
We roll again. When the blue lights start.
(See, Jordon sat behind me in second grade.
She sharpened up these orange pencils and poked me
like some version of throwing rocks on the playground as a bouquet.)
We see the police officer’s spotlight in the rearview
Mirrors. Dane wets his finger and kills
the roach in the ashtray, whispering,
“Everybody light cigarettes. All the windows down.”
It must have looked like we were taking photos
in there, six cigarette lighters for miscreants.
His flashlight hits Jordon,
her cig lit on the wrong end.
She says: “Didn’t we go to Sunday School together?”
Step out of the car. Just her.
They walk toward the mausoleum,
but we hear him: How you been?
She returned alone.
Insisted on driving—out,
into the country, to the upside-down-man tree,
which silhouetted itself against illuminated clouds.
She drove to the last of the streetlights
to the country graveyard outside town.
2.
Suspended Bluegill
Because I once pulled a canoe
onto a sandbar on the Buffalo National River
and walked up a cold, spring-
fed rivulet
until I came to a clear
pool with suspended bluegill
stippled by intermittent sunbeams,
which were slanting—
parallel and mote-filled—
down through the sycamore canopy overhead.
That’s why.
3.
When a calendar
is a phone
is a screen—a screen
whose Windows won’t
screen anything—
Your suicidal sundial grows bright
as a clockradio
whose phone has synced
Her calendar
to a pulpy Almanac
4.
When words are data
IT picks a fight
With HR. Admins stop talking
Writing, pedagogy. Start
Rightsizing,
Leveraging deliverables,
Synergized marketing. They Stop
Studenting. They Start
retention
Interventions,
Scaled goal-oriented committee engagement.
Some redundant dean effaces the library’s reference
Section to make room for more commerce,
Café au lait.
He hides the periodicals. He Unsubscribes
from the wafer
of paper
on tongues
5.
When she feigned appetite
Rolled cherry tomatoes ‘round,
Picked at the arugula, giraffe
Meat, pushed
The otter heads to form
A centerpiece, I knew
My sister was mourning
our mother.
You've been listening to the poetry of Josh Brewer on the Poets Weave, I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.
