ISSUE 49
November 2010

Jack Powers

 

Jack Powers Jack Powers teaches English and special education at Joel Barlow High School and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, with his wife and three children. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Inkwell, Atlanta Review, The Ledge, and Naugatuck Review, among other magazines.

Old    

               — After Anne Sexton's "Young"


Ten thousand yawns from now
when I am a bent question mark
and the children are busy living

and a push of a buzzer
summons the night nurse,
I will drag my oxygen tank trolley

—resistant like a leashed mutt—
across sticky linoleum
to peek between drawn blinds

and squint to find Orion,
the Big Dipper and his little friend
and remember a beach in Rhodes

where stars littered the sky
like luminescent river stones
so big, so close

we could pluck them
from the heavens,
offer them to each other

like promises and the universe
seemed—like our lives—
to roll on forever.

We had few questions
and the sky seemed full
of answers, some hurtling

like arrows into the future.

 

 

Jack Powers: Poetry
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