The April Featured Poet is Scott Urban

Please feel free to email Scott at: surban1874@yahoo.com

HELPING HAND

On Monday, January 22, 2012, law enforcement officers in southeastern Ohio searched for the body of Carol Ann Rhim, allegedly slain and dismembered by her boyfriend, who subsequently committed suicide.

One remembers
walking roadside clean-up
for some high school club—
he can’t think which one—
when one of his friends grabbed
a handful of t-shirt
and pretended to shove him
in the path of a barreling semi.
He’d nearly peed his pants.

Another recalls a fast food ad campaign
and shouts out, Parts is parts!
His partner groans, threatens to shoot him.

The K-9 officer advances,
hop-step, his arm leashed
to the dog trained to track
the redolent bouquet of corpserot.
They hit on dead opossum.

When they tear open
a sun-warmed garbage bag
they are relieved to root through
greasy burger wrappers,
empty cat food tins,
last week’s newspaper.

As long as it’s not
an upturned palm,
fingers curved like brackets,
waiting for a helping hand
come a day too late.

PROLOGUE: EXIT 63

They walk down the ramp.

Grey clouds span the sky
like soiled gauze loosely wrapped
around our open wound of a planet.

A hundred yards ahead, one of last century’s Celicas
is held together with staples and duct tape.

I said, I thought we could make it.
The drizzle has slicked the thinning hair
over his scalp like spider webs crossing a void.

Now you owe me for the damn gas can, too.
She holds her jacket closed because the zipper’s broken.

The driver in the Prius is trying to change
the playlist on his iPod plugged into the dash,
doesn’t pay as much attention as he should
through the smear on his windshield.

The pavement’s more slick than before
and the rain drowns out the sirens.

RED FROM THE SPANKING

After the traffic cop
has pulled you over
and written out the ticket

there’s a stretch of time
when you can’t make the car
go any faster than the speed limit

and the silhouette of each vehicle
coming into view around the corner
seems to have a lightbar on top.

It’s the salt in the teacher’s words
that slams the class clown
back in his seat, arms across his chest,

pulse racing more quickly than if
he had taken a right hook to the jaw
or a cowardly kick to the crotch.

The boss’s abrupt five pm email—
See me first thing Monday morning—
churns in the gut all weekend long,

leaves you more drained than
a salmonella hamburger or
a night in a mistress’s bed.

But we are what we are.
So you pay the ticket.
And the sting fades after the boy’s beltwhipping.

And you think,
well, shit, everyone else does it
and gets away with it.

You shouldn’t be surprised
we picture Adam’s wife
bringing sin down on our collectively fallen head

by biting into crisp skin
as red and sweet
as the blush of shame on a cheek.

Recent work by Scott Urban can be found in Bonded by Blood, volumes 4 and 5 (SNM Horror), Tales of Terror and Mayhem (Evil Jester Press), and Beneath the Pretty Lies (Wicked East Press). After several decades on the Atlantic coast, he now resides among the shadow-shrouded forests of southeastern Ohio where he teaches at a local college and intends to make sure his new home is haunted.