Russ Brickey
To A
Kite at 12 Years Old
That day you
held your breath till
you tilted and blew
above the neighborhood.
Suburbia was only
a salad of trees and ticky-tacky then.
You tipped over the hills,
high and wild,
toward vague blue nothings.
The other children
gazed up at you
with their comic-book
eyes, amazed finally into
sawdust and silence.
The adults ceased their works
of days and hands and
simply stood in awe,
some for the first and only time.
Treasure this one victory. When you
soared like a beanstalk
past the overt lives
of oppressed buds and graded lawns
toward the mysterious verge.
Like any wind-blown husk,
you were
trim and beautiful with nature
and yet hollow in the bones.
Keep it close to your
windup heart,
because it’s hard to
get up there
with a thousand angels
dancing on your pink candy skull,
when your feet are heavy
and your father’s vowels
fall and spatter like fruit
from his windows.
These days will someday
return as a coal in your throat,
stones on your feet, a storm
on your brow,
but for now
hold your breath,
rise, fly and rise, zig where
you should have zagged in the wind
and someday
watch the ground fade away
into the gray hazy days
that will follow. Rise, breathless,
till the world is a salad
and the moon is on your
left shoulder, the sun
on your right. Rise,
angry kite,
till you burn.
Russ Brickey's poems can be seen in a number of print
journals, currently online at Roadrunner and Earthshine, and
forthcoming from Packingtown Review, The Poet's Art, and Bluestem.
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Current Issue: December 2011
Russ Brickey
Jackson Burgess
Robert Demaree
James H. Duncan
Carol Lynn Grellas
Paul Hostovsky
Seif-Eldeine Och
Jane Olivier
Timothy Pilgrim
Russell Rowland
M. Travis Walsh
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