Alex DeBonis's work appears in Yellow Chair Review, Parade Magazine, Ilanot Review, Esquire.com, American Book Review, and Small Press Book Review. He teaches creative writing, literature and composition in West Tennessee, where he lives with his family.
Dragon
Years later I home to night storms and grief.
My tires hiss down the New Castle ramp
past fir trees arrayed like rows of teeth,
nearing a form--huge, dim, outlined in rain:
a new factory taller than streetlights,
broad as ten roads, silent. Tongues of flame
digest lead into gold. This latecomer and I
study each other. Its walls should end somewhere
Dragon
Years later I home to night storms and grief.
My tires hiss down the New Castle ramp
past fir trees arrayed like rows of teeth,
nearing a form--huge, dim, outlined in rain:
a new factory taller than streetlights,
broad as ten roads, silent. Tongues of flame
digest lead into gold. This latecomer and I
study each other. Its walls should end somewhere
out in the country. I'm frozen; from the steering wheel,
worming up each arm, a dread whose tail will stretch
beyond the ruin of my parents' house.
Underwater on the House
She soaks in worries. Today, in her window,
it's the house next door, a foreclosure
she'd bought her daughter Julie to flip and sell,
mid-century brick with rain-loosened shingles.
She badgered Julie to plant mophead hydrangeas,
now shrunk to tattered blue blots, storm-tossed
fatalities from Julie's careless monsoons of fertilizer
and hose water. Market value can never reach surface.
Unmoved by dire legends of DEBT, Julie instead clings
to tales of historic heat, melting icecaps, rising seas.
Humidity flows through the screen. She knots her arms.
From the Dorseys' nearby pool: storm surge sloshing,
jagged screams, a tentacled beast whips Dorsey children
into a vortex. Cracked skulls, bodies sucked under.
That something must be done plunges down her throat,
This is how, she thinks, This is how I drown.
~Alex DeBonis
worming up each arm, a dread whose tail will stretch
beyond the ruin of my parents' house.
Underwater on the House
She soaks in worries. Today, in her window,
it's the house next door, a foreclosure
she'd bought her daughter Julie to flip and sell,
mid-century brick with rain-loosened shingles.
She badgered Julie to plant mophead hydrangeas,
now shrunk to tattered blue blots, storm-tossed
fatalities from Julie's careless monsoons of fertilizer
and hose water. Market value can never reach surface.
Unmoved by dire legends of DEBT, Julie instead clings
to tales of historic heat, melting icecaps, rising seas.
Humidity flows through the screen. She knots her arms.
From the Dorseys' nearby pool: storm surge sloshing,
jagged screams, a tentacled beast whips Dorsey children
into a vortex. Cracked skulls, bodies sucked under.
That something must be done plunges down her throat,
This is how, she thinks, This is how I drown.
~Alex DeBonis