Somewhere is a college student, or farmer, or convict
or street sharing my last name. Those men crowd
round that street, faces twisted, sunlight churning.
Playing cards are spread across the asphalt. They’re hot
to the touch, so the men’s fingernails scrape shavings
from the surface when they reach for the overturned
face cards—the aces, a flush, the black lady and
her mischief evaporating from the wax, pluming,
blooming into the air, the men can breathe it in.
Each man will return home, will scrub pale fat and sweat
and bones from beneath alabaster skin, folding into
itself delicately, masculine candle wax drowning the wick.
I’d like to believe the college student is the one most like me.
What he is to me, the nervous ticking of clocks against one
another, each impatiently out of turn, drunk with handfuls
of bottled light extracted carefully from fireflies that used
to dangle above my bed as a child. They are unplugged,
extinguished, and swirling down the sink drain.
Peter LaBerge is an emerging poet and fiction writer currently in his junior year of high school. He was the runner-up for the 2011 Elizabeth Bishop Prize in Verse, and his poetry was recognized in the 2011 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. His work has been featured in a variety of print and online publications, including The Blue Pencil Online, Polyphony H.S., The Claremont Review, Burnt Bridge, Leaf Garden, and Bluestem Magazine. He founded The Adroit Journal (www.adroit.co.nr), and is currently working on his debut full-length collection of works.
