Sky Blue Eggshells
everything I hear out the window will outlive me,
the birds giving birth to birds giving birth to birds
dead tendrils of houseplant lie in piles on the floor
coiling snakes of yesterday the dust of tomorrow
a hammering echoes in the neighborhood distance
so I close the window but still hear the soft intrusion
once this room didn’t exist and one day it will not
all these barriers as fragile as sky blue eggshells
I’d like to hear the back yard sprinkler in 100 years
or next autumn if the world still forgets me by then
A Voice Calls My Name
there is a phone
beside the open window
the cord is coiled in a forever knot
the old rotary mechanism
somehow still working,
a marvel amongst the rubble of
our used future
beyond the window lies a city
where you don’t live, or you,
or you and you, all gone to the other
side of this life, grandmothers and
friends, teachers and old poets,
I sit on the bed and remember one of
the last things my Gran said
to me, the weight of this world on
her chest, catching her breath away //
and I pick up the heavy phone
I want to hear her voice again
I dial her number by heart
rotating the numbers one by one in awe
that such a thing exists, and I listen
for her ringtone, but there is no
connection on the other end
your call cannot be completed as dialed
then nothing
I hold the receiver to my ear and listen
to the hushed ghost siren of the past
a sound enhanced by the cruelties
of passing time, as outside the window birds
flutter by and a bell tolls in the noontime distance
too prescient, I think, too on-the-nose
but it tolls and tolls and I set the receiver
down in the cradle and listen to this new message
from beyond, my grandmother’s voice
coming to me in so many forms, so many ways
they say time doesn’t have a heart
but I want it to be her
so when the bell stops tolling I rise,
close the window, and follow her voice
into the sunlight
James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review and the author of Talavera Sunsets (Bottlecap Press), Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line (Gutter Snob Books), and Cistern Latitudes (Roadside Press) among other books of poetry and fiction. He currently resides in upstate New York but travels to review indie bookstores for his blog, The Bookshop Hunter. For more, visit jameshduncan.com.
