Poetry
Suburban Pastoral
by Jason Irwin
The girls in the apartment below ours
let their mail pile up in the entryway—
envelopes with foreign stamps
& giant boxes of cat food.
They complain to the landlord
about our dancing, the music we blast—
Coltrane, Hank Williams, Zeppelin—
& how, during our late-night
lovemaking, our bed creaks & cries
like a rusted seesaw.
Don’t they realize that time is an illusion?
a construct created by factory owners & priests.
Yet each night I watch it settle
in my wife’s back, forming a knot
between her Trapezius & spine.
I see it in an old man on the bus who winces
with each guarded step before falling into his seat
whimpering like a mouse.
I know he is my future self,
& that the future, if it holds any hope,
is like an hourglass turning over & over.
In the evenings, when the cicadas’
crescendo rivals the whir of cars
on the parkway, my wife & I
drive down to the Rankin Bridge
to watch the chemical sunset
reflecting in the river’s dark water—
the blood orange clouds
dissolving into blackness.
Jason Irwin is the author of three full-length poetry collections, most recently The History of Our Vagrancies (Main Street Rag, 2020). Watering the Dead (Pavement Saw Press, 2008) won the 2006-2007 Transcontinental Poetry Prize for a first book of poetry. He is also the author of two chapbooks. In 2022 he was a Zoeglossia Fellow and part of the Poetry Foundation’s Disability Poetics Project. His nonfiction has been published in Santa Ana Review, Panorama, The Catholic Worker, and City of Asylum’s Pittsburgh Live/Ability: Encounters in Poetry and Prose Project. He grew up in Dunkirk, NY, and now lives in Pittsburgh PA. http://jasonirwin.blogspot.com/