Brendan Walsh
A Longing
the concrete crust of cities, oblivion,
cracks and brittle-breaks outside office
windows; think of departing, think
of journeys and sky-emptiness, beaches
tip-toed by fiddler crabs dragging fist-claws
at the precipice of sand and sea, think
thunder and days dripping down corrugated
tin roofs when nothing was thought.
think
fruit trees—banana, tamarind in an Indian
village where sugar cane caramelizes,
heat-sweetens breath, apple in cool Autumn
Connecticut, cider doughnuts frying out
steel food-truck walls with wine-tasting
down the orange-leafed roadway, avocado
fenced in a Lao woman’s backyard and beyond
an expanse of simmering rice paddies.
freedom
feels weightless all through the bones;
when the fish are caught, fruit foraged,
land’s all a vastness unintelligible
and unimportant—a million departures.
A Longing
the concrete crust of cities, oblivion,
cracks and brittle-breaks outside office
windows; think of departing, think
of journeys and sky-emptiness, beaches
tip-toed by fiddler crabs dragging fist-claws
at the precipice of sand and sea, think
thunder and days dripping down corrugated
tin roofs when nothing was thought.
think
fruit trees—banana, tamarind in an Indian
village where sugar cane caramelizes,
heat-sweetens breath, apple in cool Autumn
Connecticut, cider doughnuts frying out
steel food-truck walls with wine-tasting
down the orange-leafed roadway, avocado
fenced in a Lao woman’s backyard and beyond
an expanse of simmering rice paddies.
freedom
feels weightless all through the bones;
when the fish are caught, fruit foraged,
land’s all a vastness unintelligible
and unimportant—a million departures.
Brendan Walsh has been published in Connecticut Review, Off the Coast, Mason's Road, Lines + Stars, Noctua Review, Drunk Monkeys, and other journals. His first collection, Make Anything Whole, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015. Walsh has taught English on a Fulbright Grant in Vientiane, Laos and has also taught in South Korea. He currently lives in Connecticut and serves as Assistant Director of International Education at Southern Connecticut State University. His work has been awarded the Anna Sonder Prize of the Academy of American Poets, the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize, and a Freedman Prize for poetry in performance.