Poetry by John Findura
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I Never Thought I’d See What I Saw Today
You don’t understand when I say gone
I mean it doesn’t exist anymore
There are many things that were once there
my hands, your mouth, etc.
I have lost all the pictures, the arcade tickets,
but I remember a motel room, a broken window,
a girl’s name, her hand on my hand
Those things don’t exist anymore, either
—
It Will Be Different
Every time I go back it is different
but this is a different kind of different
This is the kind of different where
you lose your bearings and nausea
climbs up your shaking body
This is the different where people say
They rebuilt Dresden after the firebombing
but they have never been to Dresden, never
saw a firebombing, didn’t have their own
hair singed off their arms and faces, never
heard what a spiraling funnel of fire sounds like
This is the kind where you being to pray
without realizing that you are praying
—
Something Happened
This happens all the time
and we barely realize it
Once something happened
and I touched a girl’s breast
Once something happened
and I broke my arm in half
Sometimes these things happen
Other times I spit out saltwater
Most times, though, these things
happen without us treading water
—
The Ocean Is In The Road
Most shark attacks occur
ten feet from shore
But now the ocean is in the road
No one expects a shark attack
ten feet from their front door
Then again, you never expected
the ocean to be in the road
Yet here it is climbing the front
steps your grandfather built
You want to turn and say
You’re gonna need a bigger house
Oh, darling, there’s no one there
They’ve all paddled off down the street
—
There Are Boats In The Street Five Blocks From The Ocean
What we were dealing with
is a perfect engine, a machine
that swallows everything
whole and leaves nothing behind
All this machine does is flood
the land, eat houses, highways,
trees, entire neighborhoods,
spits out splinters of boardwalks
It carries boats to streets
five blocks from the ocean
and never turns to look back,
leaving us to turn and look back
—
John Findura holds an MFA from The New School. A finalist for the Colorado Prize in Poetry and a guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, his poetry and criticism appear in journals such as Verse, Fugue, Fourteen Hills, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, H_NGM_N, Jacket, and Rain Taxi, among others. Born in Paterson, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughter.
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Featured Image photograph by E.B. Bartels, www.ebbartels.com.
