Ned Balbo
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Ruined Coast, Belt Parkway
Icy water hurls south along
a ruined coast where wrecked cars rust in sand.
What surges in my chest keeps moving faster
through a body that must be alive
because it needs to rest, and wake restored
—Not like the breakers dragging through dead frames
driven, or dumped there after they were stripped,
or set ablaze by accident, or fraud.
They are the landscape now. Driving alone,
how easy it would be to add one more…
Whose job is it to dredge for what’s discarded
on the shore or in the human heart
through darkness, landfills, guardrails that guard nothing?
—Brute force is the current that compels us.
Vortex
That vortex forming miles off in the sky
fuses the world’s noise with all its silence,
and comes out stronger: rust-orange and relentless,
whirling rage and wreckage, closing in.
What power descends….No, nothing should happen quickly
in this hour when cell phone towers are wrecked,
the land-line’s cut, and no one’s listening.
Will it touch ground? the luckless radio,
its charge run down to static, cannot say,
though, here and there, we catch the words Stay calm,
Stay calm while houses explode and cars take flight
in strange skies soon to rain down their debris
—and you look up, your trust not yet betrayed
by what we know is here and happens quickly.
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Ned Balbo's The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Story Line Press) was awarded the 2010 Donald Justice Prize and the 2012 Poets’ Prize. His second book, Lives of the Sleepers (U. of Notre Dame Press), received the Ernest Sandeen Prize and a ForeWord Book of the Year Gold Medal; his first, Galileo's Banquet, was awarded the Towson University Prize. His poems, translations, flash fiction, and essays appear in Able Muse, Creative Nonfiction, Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Sou’Wester, Unsplendid, and more. He lives in Baltimore with his wife, poet-essayist Jane Satterfield.