2 Poems
By Bart Edelman. Published on August 23, 2023.
The Girl
He had to knuckle down
And get it together.
If he were a train,
He’d be off the tracks,
Headed due south by Sunday.
It was, rather simply,
A matter of the girl—
That she had thrown him,
So far, so fast,
And he hadn’t seen it coming
From such a short distance.
He had lost himself,
Somewhere in her world:
The bangles, the buttons, the braids.
Now, she was gone,
Leaving him with an emptiness
He completely failed to fill,
Each moment of every hour,
And hope was a four-letter word
He dared not repeat,
For fear struck him stock-still.
He wished he had never met her,
Been charmed by the shy kisses,
Kept his heart in check,
Given her a second thought.
But that was part of a past
He could not merely undo,
And he knew, for certain,
The very image of the girl,
Haunted the vacant stations
He visited day and night.
Originally appeared in Havik.
Exit
They told us there was an exit,
Yet we could never find it—
So it became no use to us,
And we filled our young lives
With nothing but entrances,
One after another, after another.
We were always opening doors,
Wherever we went, for weeks on end,
Until we could no longer access
The constant approaches we took.
It was only in the beginning—
When we had a taste for the chase—
That we thought a challenge
Might very well do us good,
Strengthen our ability to problem solve,
Accept the practical, predictable advice.
However, it came at quite a cost—
This gradual process of discovery
And the final test that taught us
There was, simply, no way out—
Any means of escape, impossible.
Surely, we had the hard evidence
To prove it, even in a court of law—
If given half the chance—
But it never came down to this.
Without the proper outlet available,
We were forced to shelter-in-place,
Huddle together for safe keeping—
Dismiss what options remained.
Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, and Whistling to Trick the Wind. He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, and others.
