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.
 

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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