/ Jonathan Louis Duckworth
Reading Tranströmer at 2 a.m.
Halfway between Orlando and Miami
I pick up your Selected Poems,
and take your stanzas in nibbles,
a delicate juggling between road and book.
I shouldn’t read your book now.
Safer to let myself be hypnotized
by the highway’s piano-key ticker-tape.
But I’m awake; aware of the distance
between Florida and Sweden.
Silhouettes of palms and slash pines
are black thumbs against bright dark;
highway-side towns are campfires pitching
incandescent cinders at night clouds.
No sudden starlight in any corner.
I’ve never felt safer than now,
alone with your translated lines.
If I drive off the road,
through the barrier, into a wetland
I’ll find no man preserved in the muck.
And yet if I did, the bog body’s lignite skin
wouldn’t be swathed in woolen rags,
but a Hawaiian shirt and flip flops.
Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an
MFA student at Florida International
University, where he serves as a reader
and copy-editor for the Gulf Stream
Magazine. His fiction and poetry
appears in or is forthcoming in Sliver of
Stone Magazine, Cha: An Asian Literary
Journal, The Penny Dreadful Magazine,
Clapboard House, and Gravel: A
Literary Journal among others.