Two Poems
Of the Following Season
—for Jon Cone
I’m tired of thinking of all you dead.
The black masks of your graves,
the visions you stir in me.
Black, the surging wind rattling
each window; black, the ocean
before dawn.
When I prayed for the storm cloud,
I wasn’t asking for rain, exactly.
More so the imagination of each
of your blue midnights to be flooded.
Washed. Cleaned.
Still, you howl at me.
Wolves in my kitchen,
barking at scraps of intractable meat.
The heat of the valley this Spring;
its awkward smell, the sexual blossoms.
These goddamned crows.
If only the pear tree
could forgive them all.
Tell me, if I were to open my veins,
would their wildflowers mend you?
What My Mother Knows
It’s not because I am unsure of the name
of the apples she uses for her pies,
it’s just that I bother
to pay attention to them.
Just like when she tells me stories
of when she rode her tan mustang bareback
through the field next door to her house.
Or how she finally convinced my father
to give up drinking coffee before they married.
How, after thirty years of marriage,
he’s traded their conversations for golf courses,
as she’s traded sex for wind chimes.
That I listen better than he does
simply because I’ve learned
to hold the phone away from my ear.
I want to tell her
that in fourth grade I found his porn
and was so excited that I built my idea
of what an erection should be.
And two years later, when it finally happened,
I hid the magazines under my bed
so she wouldn’t find them.
That I quit believing in God
before I was a teenager,
and the scars she saw on my wrist
weren’t from a fish hook.
That I was the one who gave
my little brother his first hit of Oxy.
That I ignored her dying father’s calls.
That when I fuck, I shake and blame it
on the fact that I prefer to be alone.
Then drive from Salt Lake to Malad,
just for stronger beer.
I want to tell her
there is no such thing as silence.
And if she listens closely, she’ll hear everyone
waiting for her in the Afterlife—
the one she’s always been too afraid to admit
doesn’t exist.
Adam Love is an emerging writer from Salt Lake City, UT. New work is upcoming or appears in Ampersand Review, burntdistrict, Revolver, The Missouri Review, Revolver, Sugar House Review, Atticus Review, Metazen, and Main Street Rag, among others. Love is the author of the chapbook Another Small Fire (Tired Hearts Press 2013). He runs the Literary Arts portion of the Utah Arts Festival. In his free time, he tries to find himself in between surfing the Pacific Ocean and exploring the mountains and western rivers of Utah.