Steve Abbott

Back to Issue 8

The Fool's Boy

Unamused, he wishes he was never a son,
that his father had not cast the shadow
of namesake over the joy of being unknown.
 
Children point sharp fingers. They crow
at him—not as their parents laugh when
truth, hidden in wit, relieves their woe
 
and props them up as they stagger and lean
into their days—but with a tone aimed low,
jeering like the crowd that would condemn
 
a scapegoat. There’s no way he can know
the weight his father bears, the entire town
lifted by a silly dance, pratfall, a slow-
 
motion imitation of the mighty, the throne
itself fair game. All he knows is, hedgerows
smirk at him, the voices slinging stones
 
that pierce his ribs like arrows and go
deep, fangs driving poison into vein,
their grinning teeth flashing blades, no
 
humor in the mocking eyes that bone
him, strip skin from his back like crows
picking a carcass black and crimson.
 
All of them, gap-toothed boys and doe-
eyed girls, mark him for jest, cheap fun
as a respite from the dirt of their days, so
 
little else to celebrate. It feels like a sin
of the father draped over him, the flow
of a blood curse needling under the skin
 
he wears like a heavy coat he would throw
off if he could. This is the boy’s burden,
the role of sage disguised as imbecile he knows
 
will be his life, this inheritance a weapon
he must pick up or he too will grow,
like the others, to fearful silence. When,
 
older, he learns each day not to swallow
his tongue, his voice will be the only one
free to say what all would say, phrased just so.

Grapefruit
     from a line stolen from Jerry Roscoe

When the universe was
the size of a grapefruit,
no one needed
 
to compute its expanse
or ponder potential infinity.
No one wondered
 
about light years, black holes.
A girl on a playground swing
could peel back the orb’s yellow
 
mystery and gently squeeze out
the sweet juice of creation.
Wiping sticky mouth and fingers
 
on a T-shirt, she could lift
her feet
and glide.

​Current Events

The day we walked down to the shore,
neither of us knew. It would take days
for the world to reach us, as it once
took weeks or months to know of
the dead relative, the great ship lost at sea,
the head of state whose people had again
wearied of their misery and risen to walk
on him with his own shiny boots.
Our nights were a poem we couldn’t read
beyond, our days a single stretch of beach
where we left wet footprints beneath
the sweet sad music of the birds.
What world there was, wheeled in our orbit.
 
It had already happened, and now everything
whispers weightlessness, searing digitized
seams along the edge of the sky.
The world arrives as invisible ripples,
a current of radio waves and satellite pictures
to which the entire globe vibrates,
as one organism, to the movement anywhere
of flags, the movement of money.
 
It was the movement of small people,
and their angry shouts coming to us
as from a great distance, like a gunshot
over water, that sent the air up in a wave.
We didn’t know we would come to live
within its cresting, or that these events
would become near the shore the glimmering
edges of an insistent, humbling rhythm
nudging us, like newborns, awake.
 

A native of Columbus, Steve Abbott was a founding member of The Poetry Forum, now Ohio’s longest-running poetry series. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in, among other journals, The Connecticut Review, Rattle, Spoon River Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, A Narrow Fellow, Big Scream, Pavement Saw, Pudding, Slipstream, and Santa Clara Poetry Review as well as in several anthologies. His third chapbook, The Incoherent Pull of Want, was published by Night Ballet Press this spring. He recently served on the Ohio Arts Council panel selecting Ohio’s first Poet Laureate.