Poetry – Issue 5 | June 2009
Automobilia
by C.B. Anderson
Ingloriously junked, not even worth
the effort it would take to salvage them
as scrap, a million miles or more of short
commutes to work and summer odysseys
to tourist-friendly shores behind them, ten
or twelve dismembered hulks lie still within
the grip of weeds and weather, monument
to highway maps, the last unburied dead.
An eyesore to the neighborhood, a shred
of local Rust Belt deemed a legacy
a father visited upon his sons,
rededicated to the semen-stained
upholstery in back seats where DNA
evaporated many years ago,
they stand a silent vigil to this day
in honor of a fuming lineage.
To talk of towing them would be an insult,
just as it would have been when Daddy first
decided to commemorate the family
history by going public: auto-da-fe,
twenty-four/seven, fifty-two/forever.
His legal heirs, we comb our hair and grit
our teeth, remind the neighbors who we are,
and dwell beside the icons of decay.
About the author
C.B. Anderson has resided in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and New York; these days he is stuck in Massachusetts, a mode of durance which is fortunately relieved by frequent long stays in Maine. You can find his work in Blue Unicorn, Nassau Review, Contemporary Sonnet, Lucid Rhythms, and Soundzine.
Read our current issue, Issue 5 | June 2009:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
