They grasp the edges of the off-white parachute
in 1st-grade gym class, soles of their sneakers
peeling off, nursery rhymes rendered mute
like a poisoned pond emptied of frogs’ croaks.
Our wonder’s stilled, a stratovolcano drained
of Greek gods, a pristine lake pumped as dry
as the Atacama, like a later Obama’s sighs
methodically drawn, his strained neck craned
towards a tea party, his own abruptly over…
Once, in my mid-20s, I stood at the Hudson River,
stared at twin rectangles, as a blur of limbs
waved at a nightmare crashing in, a blossoming
of flames; at first, just two souls, then scores
tumbling, holding hands, dreaming of a floor.
Jonathan Greenhause’s poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and he has won Aesthetica Magazine’s Creative Writing Award in Poetry, the Goldsmith Poetry Festival Competition, the Ledbury Poetry Competition, the Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition, and the Telluride Institute’s Fischer Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, The Believer, New York Quarterly, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Society, and Subtropics.
