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September 13, 2017

Three Poems by JD DeHart: "Major Major," "Opus," and "Doesn't Leave the Room"

JD DeHart is a writer and teacher. His work has appeared recently at Oddball Poetry and Cacti Fur, among other places. He blogs at jddehartpoetry.blogspot.com








Major Major

Dressing the world
in green camouflage, hiding
behind bushes, strong
rhetoric, borrowed steel blade –

Where I live the sky
looks plentiful with calm,
not a cloud wisp displaced,
the drive through is too long,
average problems –

What does the horizon
look like when upended,
thunder rumbling sound parting
clouds, allowing a bomb’s passage?

How does the world
sound as it cracks?



Opus

Lyric lightly playing
replaced by neighborhood thump,
the flicker of lights igniting
someone else’s party –

This is the not the melodious
interplay of thoughtful instruments;
rather, the cacophony and din
of the disenfranchised –

Denizens of some lower caste
who managed to put shiny penny
to wrinkled dollar, affording
a sound system to blare ennui,

beating away deepest
night with indistinguishable sound.



Doesn’t Leave Room

There is no room to find
in the imagination after
some stories are told, after
some outfits are worn,
kind of like

my own lack of elbow room
at thirty-some thousand feet,
a sea of elbows next to me,
tray table lowered awkwardly.

A flight attendant
fusses with her hair, knee
bent toward the other leg,
balancing herself gracefully
somehow

while I am chewing
on ice, turning it out
into my waiting mouth,
in my tiny cramped space
far above the earth.



© JD DeHart