Jason Labbe
Map of May 20
My frontal lobe roams the lowest
forest of the Valley. The door
almost opened itself. I blame the white
stone hidden deep in my inside
pocket, though my jacket’s in tatters,
unwearable, left on the floor
of somewhere I don’t want to live anymore.
The hottest day is this one. I blame
the thin shine of sweat on my bare arms
and the light black hair clouding my tattoos.
I am rusting out like a Ford
abandoned in brush off the fire road,
and I blame the mosquito I would slap
if I could kill anything, directly,
if I could answer a yes or no question
with anything but the least oblique
adverb my white stone struggles to conjure.
You ask, if we were teleported to a quiet
room far from trees at their present height
and the Housatonic at its current depth,
would you grow a shade garden
under my tallest interior maples?
Recklessly says my spade, my shovel,
the sparkling loam I turn over.
Jason Labbe is the author of Spleen Elegy (BlazeVOX, 2017), and his poems and prose have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Boston Review, A Public Space, Colorado Review, American Book Review, Poetry, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He lives in Bethany, Conn.
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