BOOK REVIEW David Rigsbee reviews Staying Blue by Gibbons Ruark
Soham Patel is a Kundiman fellow. Her work can be read in Marginalia, Main Street Rag, Malleable Jangle, Copper Nickel, Cranky, SHAMPOO, Stirring, Shaking Like a Mountain, Foursquare, and Boxcar Poetry Review.
Shade Train
—after Georg Trakl
A breeze mixed with sun
sends the white plastic
shopping bag afloat.
What was in it is gone—
a hidden blessing
from this pale heat. A red
thread ties itself around
her unmarried right wrist. She waits.
Blue air drops onto the train tracks,
sound is made like a friend's last lyric. Torn
& burning, the foot's skin curls under
pretending for shade.
This makes a refuge for the blue air,
now it can hear the last lyric loudly.
The lively rhymes of overlooking orphans
make late afternoons groan out
a new kind of pang for each empty car.
