Crosshair

The one time her father

put a gun in her hand,

 

my wife shot until

a shell rattled inside her

 

goggles, the casement

a coal flung from the barrel.

 

She knows how much

fire weighs more than I do.

 

I never saw her staring

down the sight, ordered

 

to stamp the target

on the chest.

 

As we pass the shooting

range, she starts

 

when I grab her hand;

how like a heart,

 

her knuckles clench

and clench again.

---

Finish Line

 

The bump onto the onramp woke us from our phones

as we saw the highway our bus jerked onto,

the operator not saying we were taking a detour

 

until we were merging into traffic. Downtown,

a marathon was stomping on bus lanes in bibs and

track shorts. Our stop was shoved to the finish line;

 

I was pushed into a crowd, learned to share space

by watching it taken away as joggers skipped down

avenues taped shut. As a kid, I never had the luxury

 

of stepping off the curb without looking both ways;

not since the night I heard the shriek of brakes

from the basement, the hammer of skull on hood,

 

an engine tearing up the street, its license plate

a flash. Neighbors came to their porches, then

the street, then the ambulance, Cameron’s mother

 

moaning after the sirens stopped. Running in a street is

no different than running through a cemetery. I don’t

want to count how many people I have stepped over

 

because I’m afraid, not of seeing a face I recognize,

but my own, stamped in pavement by treads

who didn’t know I was in their way.

---

Geoff Anderson curated Columbus, OH’s first poetry shows for biracial writers (The Other Box), translation (Lingua Franca), and immigration (New World). He’s a Callaloo fellow and his chapbook, Humming Dirges, won Paper Nautilus’s Debut Series (2017). He has work on/forthcoming in Tinderbox, Juked, Southern Indiana Review, and www.andersongeoff.com.