Bruce E. Whitacre | The Foldout Couch

 

Jesalah Love Art Neon Sign
After Keith Haring

The Foldout Couch

 

His force thumps the entire divan

against the renter-white wall,

adding to the small dents.

These are the good years.

Galaxies revolve like the club door, powered

by magnetism and mystery.

Tossing cushions is foreplay,

though sometimes here the fizz goes flat.

A bicep in the red lava light,

an ass in the veil of blue smoke, its globes

green glitter-strewn and sweating. Heaving

planets and stars call

to the white light between the eyes,

the fire in the throat

as you take all he’s got.

The collapse, the caress, the clip

of the spring through the mattress.

Another notch in the floor.

Counting down the security deposit.

 

Previously published in RFD, Issue 190, Summer 2022, pp 55-57, with other poems from Whitacre’s forthcoming Good Housekeeping.

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s recent publications include his debut poetry collection, The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks (Crown Rock Media, 2022); Sky Island Journal; Poetry X Hunger; Dear Booze; Diane Lockward’s third volume on craft, The Strategic Poet; and the 2022 anthology I Want to Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. Work here was nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology and the 2024 Pushcart Prize. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. Bruce is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, with his husband.

Bruce Whitacre | What Is Fire to Me, or, Sailor’s Delight

What Is Fire to Me, or, Sailor’s Delight

 

 

Wood smoke lingers aboard the LA plane

that just flew down a burning West Coast;

New Mexico’s blue skies are veiled in talcum —

these warming sunsets — candescent red.

 

Facing west, we eat at a High Plains café;

the dock probes a receding reservoir’s extended shore;

cottonwood seeds blizzard pink in twilight —

these warming sunsets — simmering red.

 

Bryant Park is sticky with a strange haze;

our tongues salted with the cremated West:

lodgepole pine, mule deer, and mountain lion —

these warming sunsets — radiant red.

 

Coast to coast, the signs rain down from heaven,

launched by scarlet, canyon-scorching flames,

cataclysm of pyrocumulus sky fall —

these warning sunsets — alarming red.

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s recent publications include Hey, I’m Alive; Nine Cloud; Pensive; Diane Lockward’s third volume on craft, The Strategic Poet; and the 2022 anthology I Want to Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. Work here was nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. Bruce is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, with his husband.

Bruce Whitacre | Christmas Oranges

CHRISTMAS ORANGES

The children were not to watch

as Father unloaded the snowcapped wagon.

Crates and bushels went straight to the cellar

and under an Indian blanket.

Father pocketed the key with a wink.

Jennie had to sit to keep breathing,

her hands trembling as she cracked the walnuts.

 

That evening, candles clipped to the fir were lit.

Their dots of light graced the gingham bows, the popcorn

strings, casting deep shadows in the parlor corners.

Atop the white tablecloth brought from Ohio,

turkey with stuffing, yams, and fruit pies crowded

the table, so everyone ate standing or in the parlor.

Mother fanned herself at the fire, exhausted, while

Nora, the hired girl, hovered, hiding homesick tears.

Family and neighbors joined in rolling up the rugs,

then with fiddles and dancing. Jennie missed the beat.

Stepping to the window, she gazed through the frosted panes.

Stars arched over the prairie. Horses stomped under their blankets.

 

Father called her into the kitchen.

“I want you to see these first, Jennie. Remember?”

His carpenter’s hands, deft and hard, pried a crate open.

Golden spheres burned into view, sweet and strange.

“Oranges!” she cried. Father laughed, “They made the last train.”

She remembered from last year to peel them first

The flesh exploded in her mouth —

Ocean. Green. Warm. Sunshine.

She closed her eyes and swallowed. Not here, in one taste.

 

She carried a bowlful into the parlor.

The music stopped. The dancers paused.

She beamed as everyone surrounded her, each reaching for

an orange, the only ones any of them would eat that year.

The night froze in her memory like crystals on the panes

melting into a tale from time to time, like now,

for me, then freezing again for the next blue hour.

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Journal of Poetry, Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today, and was recently nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues.  He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. An activist and advocate for the arts and social justice, Bruce lives in Forest Hills, Queens.

Bruce Whitacre | The Ecru Shirt

The Ecru Shirt

 

I never knew anyone else who claimed it,

But Dad insisted it was his favorite color.

When our young family moved into our $25,000

Custom-bilt split-level, the kitchen was yellow-warm.

 

Our motorboat had a goldenrod dual hull.

He could not mount his skis himself,

But he spent entire weekends towing

His sons tandem in his sparkling wake.

 

Having a favorite color is convenient to others,

An easy default for ties, appliances, even for cars,

But it captured as well his warmth and his wit,

His mellowing with age into a crusty outlier.

 

Flipping through his closet the day after,

We chose the parti-colored sport coat;

It matched the well-worn ecru shirt.

And so he went loudly to the grave.

 

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s work has appeared in Cagibi, The HIV Here and Now Project of Indolent Books, North of Oxford, and World Literature Today. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is an activist and advocate for the arts and social justice. He lives in Forest Hills, Queens.