The Lazyboy

On my walk to dance class

because the Lazyboy was facing me

I stopped next to a busy street

in a white stone driveway.

Beside a truck, it sat without

its carpet, table, lamp or TV,

head and armrests discolored

from unwashed hair and greasy fingers.

All the spasms of light it’d absorbed-

sitcoms, commercials, late night movies

cast across sky blue fabric in morning,

navy in midday, wee hours grey.

I walked behind it, looked out at the street.

What would we be watching,

this Lazyboy and I? Voyeurs of what?

White, black, red cars blurred past.

Sunrays reflected off windshields in fits. 

I sat. I rocked. I swiveled. I reached deep

into its crevice and retrieved the remote.  

I pulled the lever.

first published in Hartskill Review: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Vol. 2, Issue 1. Ed. Joshua Hjalmer Lind. Eau Claire: ThrewLine Books, 2015. 5. Print.

the blackest imaginable white

there is no horizon.

nothing is crisp, everything the same shade of white.

you assume gravity is in check, that you’re standing upright.

from your mind’s eye, you conjure up turns you normally base

on split second analyses of angles and shapes.

a distant version of yourself, you feel you’ve been here before,

but all you truly know is where earth pushes up more.

in vain, questions eddy in this whitewash guise;

you might as well ski with eyes closed, you realize.

if not for the lone tree, a child’s scribble on the page,

speed and direction would be impossible to gauge.

but when a turn takes your gaze away from this pine,

and before you’ve found a new guiding sign,

your stomach falls into your throat; you turn upside down,

tumbling in an inner ear tempest, empty of sound.

and for a brief moment, the blackest imaginable white

beckons you to the edge of the world, in blinding light.

first published in Hartskill Review: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Vol. 2, Issue 1. Ed. Joshua Hjalmer Lind. Eau Claire: ThrewLine Books, 2015. 4. Print.