R L Swihart


Home

DTW. They’re de-icing. Icy wet with a little brown.
A supersized Slurpee cascading over window
and plane

*

How can I say it? They believe, with a false confidence,
they’re delivering themselves and things

*

Try to fix her and you fail. If that’s the truth,
what does it mean

*

Signs of death. There’s a process. He spoke a lot with Mama.
So far as they could tell, he spent his last two weeks
mostly with ghosts. “Cecil?” “Yes. He was there.
He kept bringing me cantaloupes”

*

One plane in front of us. Flurries. Nearly horizontal.
The window is a racetrack for tears



Trapped

Round and round it goes. Where it lands nobody knows

*

“This this this.” “What? And what about X?” “Don’t even compare.
She has nothing to do with him”

*

“I like to beat a dead horse as much as anyone, but couldn’t
we agree that this is insoluble. And certainly none
of us is perfect”

*

“Umph”

*

They all grew silent. The remote pondered. Something insipid
appeared on Netflix

*

The winter forest was soon lost in night. The last to leave was
the silver tip of a leaning maple. The sibling shepherds
were let out once more before being caged

*

That night a hard rap on the door woke K and he braced
for the worst. An hour later, after the rap came again,
he realized it was only the mad cat

*

In the morning, M rang from Reykjavík, raving about the Blue
Lagoon and the leave-threatening snow



More Than Anything

The fly in the ointment

The grounds at the bottom of the cup

The bud nipping with X (who cares whether
it’s by the cup or pound)

The Cycladic dolls

The Goo Goo Dolls

The glue that either is or isn’t

*

I slept because of Claritin D. Then I didn’t
sleep because my heart was doing
calisthenics

*

I want my right ear back. More than anything I want us back –
gobbling down rotisserie chicken and drinking red Rhône
in Antibes, shedding more than a few years



2020

I like the look and sound of it

*

Another tally, but what’s the point
of keeping score

*

I was thinking along those lines when the bright sun
redirected my attention and I noticed the heart
in relief writ large on a Bay Shore bench:

                               A.S.K.
                Always looking at the glass
                               half full

*

OK, what of it

*

Past the bridge to Mother’s Beach. Along Marine Stadium
(the red, white and blue fire boat split the water and the waves
from a pleated skirt hit the shore, crashing like liquid
dominos). The Lagoon. Home

*

She already had the tree half down. I packed up
the laser lights

*

In an hour or so the bare tree would be curbside,
waiting for someone to take it away




R L Swihart was born in Michigan and currently lives in Long Beach, CA. His poems have appeared in various online and print journals, including The Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, Cordite, and Quadrant Magazine. Matman & Testudo, his second book of poetry, was released in June 2018.
 
 
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