Ode on Fentanyl
Stephanie Jones
Dead eyed road. Outskirts
of a limbless town. Rusted wheat
fields and solar panels
cracked & strewn. Or abandoned
cabins
on a prisming
lake. Or commuter rail
stations emptied, echoing like
wind through mission walls.
Or city blocks, cracks spackled
with aimless
sweat. Bodies under
overpasses. In two-room
bungalows. Along a grassy
clearing behind the Stop&Shop
parking lot. Squeezed
into alleys. Damp alleys half-lit
at midday lost
at night beneath
a decommissioned
moon. Where
does the tingling
start, the nerve ending
obliterating— under fingernails?
Between lips
slowly unpressing.
Shoulders sloping
everything
unknotting. A child slips
from the top
rung of a jungle
gym. A tabby licks a
cold chin. Death without
much intrusion.
*
Jersey rain floods
the Hudson. Evening’s
silverware bundles
in the corner of your
sink. An hour you’ve
spent in domestic
meditation, cast iron handle
in one
hand,
smile teasing concentration
in your brow.
Your last Marlboro
cashed, resting in its
ashes on
the windowsill. You move
you whir you bend you
chat & laugh & climb over
the couch to reach
the TV. Change
the channel by
hand.
Years have held you in stop
motion, bound you
to one act days. Settled
a haze in your
brown eyes. Shadow-stalked
your smiles like
a hasty scavenger. Plunged
screws into
your flesh. I have
cried —cried— on my
ordinary
knees cried
for your quiet agonies.
As I’m crying
now. Watching
how you angle
your body to arrange our
dinner plates on the drying
rack. An ease
I’ve never seen you
know.
And maybe someday I’ll even
understand
how
the grace
that gives you back
your life
wastes so many.
Like rain
storming a drought scorched
plain
at last greening withered
aster, sage and
goldenrod
and flash drowning beetles
caught grounded on
their backs
in the rushing
flood.
Stephanie Jones
Stephanie Jones is a New York writer & poet with bylines in The New York Times, DownBeat, NPR: Music, JazzTimes and The Detroit Free Press. Her poems appear in New Reader Magazine, Poetic Sun, 50-Word Stories & Stone Poetry Quarterly, and as a commission for Blue Note Records.