J.V. Brummels
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Motion
Sometimes town makes me mean
like just after that sideways grin
of a crescent moon framed just so
out my only west window is eaten
by another neighbor’s nasty tree
And when a beer on the back stoop
even on the first night of a hundred
I don’t need to ice the other five
ain’t enough and even language fails
a city man like me turns the key
and floats through all the high-corn corners
each intersection out to nowhere
a life-and-death risk but less
than another stay-alone scratch on my spirit
I don’t stop till I find a spot
along the edge of the Milky Way
planets and stars so common in the sky
the old ones made up games
in the names of their odd geometries
And beneath that light –
or by my Oldsmobile’s highbeams
if I’m not so good in the night –
I gather some subspecies of sunflower
from the long deep ditch
that show a little wilted
under the Alero’s dome light
I turn around the other way
but when I stop on every hilltop –
distant from farmhouses so my lighted car
don’t scare the straights –
to write another line
my mileage drops off
to a six-pack to the poem
And because the county closed this road
to build another bridge to nowhere
I risk the highway and a DUI
or a wreck and me on a collapsible gurney
with my good name and flowers scattered
in the strobe of the State T’s cherries
I can’t help but move to her motion
Face it boys
you’ve risked more before for less
Roadwork
Last of a winter cold
in cysts in my throat
not much more than meds
in my belly
this moist spring a m
When I kneel to eartag her fresh calf
the little red mama cow
charges like a spendthrift
through the amniotic mist
No more ground for me to give
nothing but a hundred open acres
of grass to hide in
Friends post their status
on virtual walls
The American dream
is open for business
Red neon blinks in the gloom
Souls Bought at Wampum Prices
I write for peace
*
By afternoon I say I’m ready
to drive away the sad
window-shop these end-of-America blues
make a run at nirvana maybe
shoot for a distant connection’s house
The low sky leaches the color
of trees and fields and pastures
to the gray shade of highway
An old river-valley cottonwood bows
for the wind’s polite clapping –
a blind man in the dark
kissing the back of a pocketwatch
Crossing a dam at 4:34
it’s all spilt milk
and the talk turns to lactation
Asleep or nearly so
dry eyes behind my shades
I have little to offer
but a hoarse throat
burning for voice
*
It’s the politics of pouring rain
out a plateglass c-store door
prismed puddles by the sheltered pumps
the splatter of falling water on asphalt
the cow of heaven pissing
on the flat-as-a-plate rock of earth
to the last bladder-draining flush
And here comes the sun
under the hood of breaking clouds
over the sparkle of far red-grass hills
like a lover winking across a party
or across morning sheets
like the lover standing at my side
Bio
JV Brummels’ fifth collection, City at War, was published by The Backwaters Press in late 2009. His work has been recognized with a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Elkhorn Prize and the Mildred Bennett Award for contributions to the state’s literature from the Nebraska Center for the Book. His Book of Grass was awarded the 2008 Nebraska Book Award for Poetry.
Raised first on a farm and later on a ranch, he was educated at the University of Nebraska and later Syracuse University. In 1984 he began a horseback cattle outfit to raise natural, grass-fed beef, which he still operates.
A longtime professor at Wayne State College, he’s also written and published short fiction and a novel. For the last fifteen years he’s served as publisher of Logan House, which specializes in contemporary American poetry and short fiction. In 2006 he was named editor of the newly created WSC Press.