Five Poems
Jeff Newberry
Utepils
From the Norwegian: a lager enjoyed outside
You see them this time of year, early spring,
a just-mowed yard smelling of cut grass,
sitting on white-railed front porch, legs crossed,
a look of imminent satisfaction etched
onto a face red with sun and sweat.
They pop an American brew, these men
whose days are measured and edged
as the lawn. The taste must be serene,
the beaded can a cold thank you in palms
their fathers would have found too smooth,
too slick, money hands Quint says in Jaws.
Richard Dreyfusses, all of us, we consider
our hands and the grass-flecked white shoes,
the stuff of memes and internet jokes,
dismissed for dismissing. Not fathers
that punched clocks or loaded flatbeds
at the railyard. There’s a kind of salvation,
though, in this moment, a domestic beer,
a breather after yard work. A house needs
upkeep, our fathers would have said,
their years thrown into the wind, green
confetti that lands on this freshly-cut lawn,
fodder that will feed the years of grass to come.
Changing the Oil
Junior year, head full of Shakespeare and English anthology pieces by Hardy and Hopkins, Eliot and Larkin, I walk across a verdant campus, smell the river beyond the pines and consider my dead father, who cut meat until his heart quit—not the metaphor my professors preached, but a real, honest, heart-stop, death unadorned, uninterpreted.
We pass two girls from our hall, shy in their mid-90s way, all dark eyeliner and ripped t-shirts, all lip gloss enough to fuel late-night sweating sessions alone in my dorm bunk. Where are you going? they want to know. The question strikes me as profound as the undiscovered country, a no-place that no one can know. What dreams may come? the Danish prince wondered.
My roommate says we’re dining hall bound. We’re changing the oil in his car after, I offer, my Southern accent turning oil to awl. They laugh and ask me to repeat it, changing the awl. I hear all and think of long lectures in critical theory, the debate between the one and the all, the self and the world. The moment weighed vs. the life considered.
They move on, a couplet from a sonnet, the turn at the end that changes it all. No romance that evening, we finish our sandwiches and jack up an early 90s sedan. Dark, spent oil leaks into a disposable pan.
Tartle
From the Scots, a word meaning to hesitate in recalling a familiar person’s name.
I forget myself more and more
and stumble over words that will
not come. I stare, dumb, mouth
agape, mind at war with tongue
until perhaps from the double-
stacked file lockers in my mind,
some name or word emerges,
dusty, coughing, a half-hearted
apology for taking so long. Roads
and streets, rivers, creeks, friends,
those I’ve yet to meet: all the same,
names that exist just beyond reach.
I should know them. Commit
them to memory like prayers
to recall. Something keeps them
from me, there in the gray. Some
unacknowledged certainty they
will not be needed for long,
that my own name will one day
fade from memory in a chat
between friends. Someone may
say, “Do you remember him?”
while the others sit, stare at beers,
mutter noncommittally about a man
who’s been gone for years and years.
Laying the Foundation
—The Tower of Babel (1600), Gillis van Vlackenborch
Because the voice is not a bird, it cannot rise
beyond the clouds, and even there, the air thins,
robbing meaning, reducing this full-throttled
scream to echo or afterthought, not the unbottled
emotion one needs to raise an angry fist skyward.
Vlackenborch’s tower narrows while the bodies
beneath boil, all flesh and sinew, earth-bound
muscle the king uses to layer the lower base,
thickening Babel outward rather than upward.
In the foreground, an architect points to plans
while a foreman looks on as though a prophet
spoke building into reality. How to measure
the land? How to summon the body’s strength
to scaffold stone and wood to a structure time
will doom? All that’s left is voice and gesture—
the point here, the order there, the certainty
of the plan, itself a useful lie that crumbles
in the tower’s growing reality, floor on floor,
tier on tier, like a wedding cake, planned
for weeks, baked with care, frosted, iced,
balanced, and then consumed by the guests
and bride and groom, who chew and swallow,
showing their appreciation only in destruction.
Building the Tower
Arches swell the superstructure, point it skyward, along
balconies where lovers stand, hand in hand, beside
columns straight and thin like supermodels.
Domes continue the illusion. How is everything
elevated? How does this tower still stand, a
façade fated—as all things are—to fall or fail? No mere
gabling, these roofs puncture skyward, the dizzying
heights where language leads. Corinthian, Doric,
Ionic—it doesn’t matter. We keep building, fit
Joist to corner to bear a new wall, a new floor.
Keystones are root words, phonemes and tonemes
lintels that keep us looking out. Each ceiling’s crown
molding keeps the gaze heavenward. Builders construct
niches in each grand room, places to peer down from
oriel bay windows to the world below. Each balcony’s
parapet keeps us safe from falling. We keep
quoins simple: an arrow skyward. The dream: no
roof to complete, just another story, another built
staircase to another floor where an offshoot
turret is a pause, not an ending. We’re never done.
Usonian conjecture aside, continue the plan. Raise
vaulted aspirations past our initial dreams.
Walls imply ceiling imply only more walls and floors,
X-braced to hold this bloated scream into the sky.
Yurt dwellers far below will worship our brave
Ziggurat, the stories we’ve built to the divine.
James Newberry is a Professor of English at Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College in Tifton, Georgia, where he teaches in the Writing and Communications program. His most recent book is How to Talk about the Dead (Redhawk Publications, 2024). His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in a wide variety of print and online journals. He currently serves as the VP of the Southeastern Writers Association.