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      May 20, 2023Luke JohnsonThe Heart, Like A Bocce Ball

      The jack sits low in the grass. We’re dead drunk,
      cannonballing across the lawn, gouging
      handful divots, each of us still nursing
      a tumbler of scotch brought home from the wake.
      We sons and brothers and cousins. I spin
      my ice and let that black-tie loosening
      buzz swarm. The others choose the sky, looping
      pop-flies that swirl with backspin, an earthen
      thud answering grunts while the soft dirt caves.
      I bowl instead, slow-ride hidden ridges—
      the swells buried beneath the grass—carving
      a curve, a line from start to stop, finish.
      The heart, like a bocce ball, is fist-sized
      and firm; ours clunk together, then divide.

      from #32 - Winter 2009

      Luke Johnson

      “Recently, I spent the summer living in a tent in the woods of West Virginia. Nights, I read poetry by headlamp: James Galvin, Elizabeth Bishop, Fred Chappell. Rain storms drummed tarps strung above me, and the poems joined those rhythms, those gales. I’d like to believe they’re equally necessary, poetry and rain, with the same capacity to ease and to overwhelm.”

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