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Geoff Anderson

May 1, 2018

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.

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Wusgood Mag’s vision is to develop a longstanding sustainable space for underserviced urban artists to have their work published and shared publically. Beginning digitally, Wusgood hopes to grow into an online & print magazine that pays contributors and staff.
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