Ethan Fogus
Floodplain

Fall rain filled the front lawn
like an upset wineglass.
As window light collapsed
in the hummingbird folds
of my mother’s fingers.
She leaned against the sink,
brewing dishwater alone.
Again, my father left
to ford the trashed floodplain
and scan the creek.

In my room,
I listened for reports
of ugly sundresses adrift
on golf courses. Restless
as the flat sheets on my
twin-sized bed—I’m too
old to be here.

A Small Grave

Sweat follows the folds in my collar
as we turned dirt with our shovels.

In the shadow’s split hem, my father
and I buried a cardboard casket.

He walked back to the cellar door
and I stopped by the apple tree

I planted when I was nineteen,
thought of hewing the taproot’s hole

as my father’s music slapped the lawn,
the third-hand dubs he cut to tape

before he knew my mother,
when he was a gap-toothed drunk

without a telephone. When he’d slip
to sleep, a restless stone toward Goliath.

Now with the door across his arm
my father calls after me—

it won’t get fruit this year.
                        Next year, hopefully.

A Visitation at Rosewood Hall

As drunken stars spill
light between parking meters, we leave
for the stone of Rosewood Hall.
Through the passageway,
beginner’s exercises grind
behind shut doors. In the practice
building, a locked door opens
with my shoulder, and we behold
a lowing spinet piano.
She approaches, lifts the fall.

a slow heat melts from her hands,
as she riddles the soundboard
and throws chords in a high angle
of sound through the frame.
I search the keyboard
for where space remains to place melody.
Where trespassing on a college campus
we might fold into the flesh of a song.

_ _

Ethan Fogus earned a BA in Poetry from Georgia State University. His work has appeared in Curio Poetry, Town Creek Poetry, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. He has served with Five Points, New South, and The Letters Festival. Ethan is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of South Carolina.

<< Back to Issue 17, 2014