Boyhood with Apocalypse & Big Box Store
The first thing God does is change all the channels to professional bass fishing.
He makes a spectacle belly flopping on every mattress & letting out an enormous sigh.
He keeps pointing to his crotch then back to the snowblowers then back to his crotch
waiting for a laugh. He rigs “One Headlight” on repeat as he air-guitars
with a Slim Jim on his throne of tires. He dons a sundress with his meat-grease
hands & waltzes through Personal Care. When I try on a pair of clearance stilettos
he scowls: Too far. At night, he peaks through the boarded doors to watch the deer
graze in the parking lot. Their neon antlers scrape the dark like feral brushstrokes.
He uncaps a jumbo Sharpie & takes an exaggerated sniff. He teaches me
the vulture’s bubblegum pink head is evolutionary—easier to dig through the dead
without feathers in the way. He plays Grand Theft Auto on a lawn chair
like he is trying to outdo the hell in the boy before him. He crashes his Lambo
into a strip club. He knows every cheat code for invincibility & max ammo by heart.
The Horse
Grazing near the road
the children on the bus watched its breath
& asked Is it making clouds?
One boy rubbed the condensation
off the glass. Took notice
of the field, the horse,
& the growing fact they both
seemed to need each other—the horse & boy—
or else the scene would suffer
an absence of sorts, like a hole
found deep in the woods one can only guess
what creature left. The feeling
was strongest in the back
of his throat. Like sucking on a penny all afternoon.
But it could be the cold. He’d left
the bus & now was the closest he’d ever been.
The horse wore a blanket
the kind someone heaves off a piano
before they sit down to play.
The wind picked up. Two exits
exist in every dream. In the future,
the boy spends his nights
driving these roads with the radio off
looking for something
to come out of them.
A branch cracks. The boy doesn’t panic.
The horse’s fur simply
slips off
like a coat from the back of a chair.
The bones come down
like windfalls. He was alone
& the future was a murmur.
Let me tell you a secret.
That hole was man-made. Deep enough
for a horse to stand
with its head sticking out
for a boy to feed it flowers.
Tyler Kline is a writer and educator from Pennsylvania whose work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Common, Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Narrative, and Poetry Daily. He earned his MFA at New York University where he was a Jan Gabrial Fellow.