by Russell Brakefield
My friend John has no birthday
most of the time. He doesn’t know
when to celebrate his own life.
Behind the register, at the bookstore,
we sneak news and baseball scores
from ancient computer monitors.
Money folds like paper flowers
back and forth across the counter.
We take turns, in shifts, trying to quit
smoking. John talks about Desire
and then Oblivion. Thirty is the decade
of the body, he says—time is a key
turning its teeth through your muscle,
through your brain. Like the cat
and mouse cartoon. The one
with the invisible ink, some force
to take your limbs from you
and then your body and then
your mind. There’s another one,
YouTube tells me, but this one’s
a duck with some vanishing cream.
The duck acts as an accomplice
to the mouse in his desire to slip
through the dirty seams of this world.
Once they take the plunge, they drop
from sight completely, knowable only
by the objects they disturb together,
the disorder they leave in their wake.
Listen to the poem here:
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“Life, like this typewriter, has no backspace.” Photo credit: Literati Bookstore
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Russell Brakefield is the author of Field Recordings (Wayne State University Press), My Modest Blindness (Autofocus Books) and Irregular Heartbeats at the Park West (Wayne State University Press). “Leap Year” is inspired by years working behind the counter at Literati Bookstore, Ann Arbor friendships, being young, etc.
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This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, a Washtenaw-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
