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      February 22, 2012Shelf LifeTerry Spohn

      And I asked myself about the
      present: how wide it was, how deep
      it was, how much was mine to keep.
      —Kurt Vonnegut

      I was making a movie in a suburb
      in a grocery store in a housewife’s dream
      I was holding a cardboard megaphone and a clipboard
      somewhere an empty chair was waiting
      the housewife had known me once
      long ago, better than I had known myself
      she pushed her cart down the condiment aisle
      one front wheel fidgeting
      like an idiot prince at his birthday party
      on the tasting table Barwell’s Pickled Beets
      the color of Grandfather’s lung
      sat untouched in their delicate paper cups
      the housewife kept a list
      clenched tightly in her fist
      if it fell and unrolled
      it could reach all the way into her next marriage
      the canned vegetable aisle was veined
      with cables and heavy plugs wrapped in black tape
      like the ground at church carnivals
      this was as close as the woman
      had been to me in years
      she moved up and down the narrowing aisles
      while the cart filled up with children
      I could almost touch her in her sleep
      could almost wake her
      I had memorized the script
      that could almost free her
      but I was busy changing it
      the movie would run backwards, all right
      all the children disappearing
      creamed corn bursting from cans
      and flowing back through factories
      and into the sun, and we would all soon begin
      to forget, as we came out of the theater
      squinting in the startling daylight
      who, exactly, we had come here with
      and which of these bright, new cars was ours

      from #35 - Summer 2011

      Terry Spohn

      “I always wanted to be a writer. I wrote my first poems when I was eleven and they had important things to say. As an adult I was disappointed to find I no longer had anything important to say: I was an empty vessel. It took some years before I realized that this is one of the things a poet needs to be. Now, in the final umpteen years of my lifelong plunge back into the earth, the world rushing up at me has grown larger than I could have imagined when I was young. Wonderous things come into focus, and all I need to do is keep my eyes open and keep breathing—the same comforts I find in writing poetry.”

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