Today's poem is by Charlie Peck

Uphill Drift
       

I slouch now in a good chair, watching episodes
of The Twilight Zone, the 1950s fears,
loneliness and aliens, and it's so strange
how before we'd been to the moon, TV made
that rock magnificent. Now I pull
the blinds to keep out its ordinary glow.

I knew a guy in college, Sam, who wouldn't go
on first dates during a full fool moon.
Nothing superstitious, just afraid the light
would play across his face and make his acne
gleam, how one thing becomes another
after a second glance. An alligator lurking

a southern swamp is just a log trolling
the murky shallows. I will slice
an onion thin enough to see through
but can't comb my hair so it doesn't splay
like a feral cat. When I was a boy I found
my mother's pink sword in her drawer,

the one that vibrated when turned. Last week
I went down Gravity Hill in Mooresville, Indiana,
put my car in neutral at the bottom of the slope,
and drifted slowly uphill. The locals swear
in 1938 a school bus stalled on the train
tracks there, and now the ghosts of dead kids

wait to push your car back up to safety, but truly
the mind's dumb perception is to blame.
An ordinary downhill that tricks the eye.
One time Sam left the house for a date and I teased
him for his mousse-slicked hair. Had I known
that a car with smashed headlights blending

with the dark would clip him, I would have asked
him to stay a while longer. Last night
in the March cold I walked home from pizza,
a round of darts, and at the intersection on Main
an ambulance waited at the red light.
Through the swinging doors I could see

the patient's black mess of hair spilling over
the stretcher cot, until the light changed
and there was only a leather bag with clumped tassels.
In the neighbor's yard lay a broken airplane wing.
No, only a snowbank, melting.
Letting the light strange its long shape.

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Copyright © 2024 Charlie Peck All rights reserved
from World's Largest Ball of Paint
Black Lawrence Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission