You looked at me as though I had eaten your last radish.
In turn I ganged up on you as though there were several of me.
“When are we going to the library, Dad?” asked an as-yet
unidentified third party lurking, presumably, in the room’s
monumental gloom. This was, after all, the house in which
Walter B. Gibson lived when he invented the Shadow,
that 1930s know-it-all whose powers lay in clouding minds
and bad guys’ eyes—and voicing chilling voiceovers.
I looked at my flieger watch and barked, “These numerals
sure pop in the half light of this airy estuary!” As they’d
been designed to. It’d all been intended, at the head
of a river of clouds, banking left into a blank whiteness
no eyes could pierce, but the nose of the family Spartan
Executive sure did, if by no other means than fate.
“It’s the nothing-butness of it all” you stumblingly began,
still radishless. I knew what you meant but kept my hand
on the yoke, my leather earflaps firmly down, my shearling
collar up. There! Below, in the clearing—a library.
“We’ll make it by morning if we keep our chin up”
a child’s voice whispered. Too true to be a lie, I knew,
and pitched evenly down, even though I also knew
I had about nine books overdue. My card by then
was suspended, but so were we, we flying dreamers,
we family. Gliding down through gilded clouds of love.
Aaron Belz lives in St. Louis, Missouri. His poetry has appeared in Fence, Fine Madness, Exquisite Corpse, The Atlantic, Anti-Heroin Chic, Nimrod, and other places. He has published four books, including Glitter Bomb (Persea, 2014) and Soft Launch (2019). John Ashbery said Belz’s poetry reminds us that poetry should be bright, friendly, surprising, and totally committed to everything but itself. Reading him is like dreaming of a summer vacation and then taking it.” His favorite revenge story is when Jael hammers a tent peg into Sisera’s head——”fasten[ing] it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary.”
