My fifth Poet of the People is Adam Houle. Adam's voice is nuanced and immediately relatable; he is refreshingly unpretentious in communicating what he sees.
Bio: Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, The Shore, and elsewhere. He co-edits 12 Mile Review with Robert Kendrick and is an assistant professor at Francis Marion University.
Hearing About the Wreck
Now I’m off the phone and pacing while my wife,
seven states away, waits in the smashed car
to relay the incident’s specifics to a bored cop
at the intersection of two wide and busy roads.
It’s a sunbaked Texas town where, I imagine,
the woman who t-boned her sizes up
the grill guard with her pea-patch husband,
both of whom are already scum of the earth,
idiot scum of the earth. Inattentive texting
while driving scum of the earth, who were posting
driving selfies or twitter polls seeking counsel
on which fast food value meal they should shovel
down their maws, chewing with their mouths open
in the living room of what I’m sure is the saddest
half a duplex in all the republic of Texas
while SVU airs and they rubberneck a gruesome case.
In another world, my wife is dead, her body
wrecked in the wreck, and that world chaffs too close
and though she’s fine, alive, shaken but fine fine fine
I’m crying and say aloud, I’d kill them both,
and in that moment, when just moments before
I debated alone paint shades for our kitchen
and asked the dogs what would be the ecological fallout
if a barred owl fell in love with a red-tailed hawk,
I’m pretty sure I mean it, which scares me
in the way it must scare the tv star
who tilts a conversion van off a crushed friend
or rushes back for an heirloom when the foundation beams
have already burst, flames rising from the floor
like geysers, the expected feats of fear and rage,
who realizes there’s another self
that sleeps and, when it wakes, is more terrifying
and courageous and, I see, more cruel, with a drill bit heart
that turns faster and with more bite the more it hurts.
Is he a necessary self? Sometimes, love is the right spring
babbling, bubbling over moss, feeding meadow reeds.
Sometimes, it’s an errant left turn and the sun burning
down the westbound lane fracturing light through a windshield’s
sheen of dead bugs. I sat there a long time,
I made a fist, I released a fist. I breathed.
A fist. I breathed. This fist. My heart’s modeled after it.
Open, it’s to hold or offer.
Closed, oh god of the plains, and I am your vicious club.
(First appeared in Baltimore Review, Winter 2019)
~~~
It’s an Empty-Headed Move I Love the Most
I swear I’ll leave your ass in Tennessee
with the trumpet vines and BarcaLoungers
slumping under carports. Maybe at a BP
near the bottom of a hill, where a state road
curves that way and a sandy one cuts back.
Maybe there next week, I’ll leave your ass.
You can throw your hands up all you want,
cinematic like, dramatic, your rage so quick
to bloom you’ll smash your phone to bits
before you’ll call me. You can be happy
in the injustice of all that balance:
a thought forms and then rejects itself, lizards grow
by eating the gray skins they have outgrown.
The dog, Caesar said, is cat. The jelly jar is cracked
and that your one good glass. Alas, I guess,
is a thing you’d say. Cross a river. Then another
or the oxbow bend of the same. It doesn’t matter.
The world reaps what the world repeats.
It’s natural as nature to always feel afraid,
to keep playing, even when you’ve been outplayed.
(First appeared in Phoebe, 52.1)
In Service
Bless this moment before the hydraulic door
sighs open. Bless the tamped heel click
on the low knap carpet. Bless the medicine
cart its quiet wheels. Bless how it feels
to watch your face attenuate as the glass
levers inward. Bless its disappearance
and the hall that takes its place. Bless this:
mylar balloons taped to temporary name plates
along the corridor. Bless late comforts. Bless night
nurses ending another shift. Bless their laughter.
(First appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Spring 2020)
Epitaph
the sky my mind
my heart an ocean
here’s an antidote
go find the poison