Three Poems
Ethan McGuire
Nostalgia
Resigned
To stalk
The sidewalks
Of past lives,
I drive
Downtown
To date in
Haunted dives.
- - -
Twilight
As I am headed home to face
The consequences of a life
Thoroughly hidden, until now,
The sun drops from the sky
Just like a wounded bird
Hit with the hunter’s shot.
- - -
Zoo Day
My son and daughter always want to go
Out to the zoo, and so we did this morning.
Yet with the noonday sun hung motionless
Above the almost non-existent clouds,
They hardly seem excited anymore.
As we trudge up a hill toward the center
Of this expansive place, they both complain.
Their soggy hands all slip against my arms.
I do not know or even comprehend
their words, though, as my eyes are both entranced
By hazy shimmers, rising serpent-like,
From all across this stretch of asphalt stench.
My kids, for one whole second, laugh to see
Three elephants, as they shower one another.
—Their excitement soon dies down, however,
When they can’t find the tigers, in the shade.
The lions, too, are hiding under shelters,
And, further down, the polar bears are tufts
Of fur, just barely white above the water.
The cages, as we pass them, smell, and worse
Than usual, so we turn away. And then
My son squints up at me, and I know what
He’s going to ask. “Can we go buy a snow cone?”
I tell him yes, but half the people here
Inside this steaming zoo must want one too.
My shirt is wet with sweat. “Three snow cones, please.”
Why do they cost so much? “Can we go home?”
My daughter asks.—“Why, yes, we can,” and do.
The car has turned into an oven. “Dad!
I’m hot!” Me too. “The car will cool down soon.”
As long as this jalopy’s AC works!
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Ethan’s notes: “‘Nostalgia’ is a cute little couplet I composed one night while walking past, and through, the various bars in downtown Pensacola, Florida. ‘Twilight’ is a little squib of a poem, another of my various experiments in kinds of blank verse, composed while jogging home and watching one of the beautiful and violently orange sunsets we have here in the farmland north of Fort Wayne, Indiana. ‘Zoo Day’ is a blank verse poem about an all too familiar event for readers with
kids and cars that barely work.”
- - -
Ethan McGuire is a writer and computer scientist whose essays, poems, short stories, and translations have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, VoegelinView, and other publications. He is an editor at Tar River Poetry, Literary Matters, and New Verse Review and the author of Songs for Christmas, Apocalypse Dance, and Ozark Son. Ethan lives with his wife and children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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