I lie awake near dawn, tumbling
through time, trying to order my years
and snag from each a fragment.
The Christmas Ash died.
The Thanksgiving I was home
to help my mother sort her life—
and look for myself in flatland
grays and browns, the plowed ground
of our quarter on Slate Creek.
And the winter I walked Clark’s
pasture with our Great Dane, Thor,
his harlequin bulk bolting
in bluestem, panthering after rabbits.
Was that 1967? Did it happen?
A freight train’s distant roar
drifts through my window now,
a grinding of wheels, of passage.
The locomotive’s horn wails
at each crossing, calls to me
in my father’s baritone, mourns
all I’ve forgotten yet still haul,
coupled behind: boxcar after boxcar,
doors numbered and sealed—
here and there a few flatbeds, loads
lashed and dark.
JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte. Fluent in German and Spanish, he has won several awards, including 1st place in the Live Canon International Poetry (U.K.) and Porter Fleming Literary competitions, 2nd place in the River Styx and Strokestown (Ireland) contests, and commendations from such journals and organizations as New Ohio Review, New Letters, and Robinson Jeffers Tor House. Hunt’s work appears or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Five Points, North American Review, Southern Poetry Review, Four Way Review, Harpur Palate, Arts & Letters, American Literary Review, Terrain.org, The Journal and Cloudbank, among others. www.justinhunt.online.
