Baton Met
The baton passes from left to right hand, anxious to be passed. With the anguish of the tether on the
precipice, I am thinking the full length of it: the damp, fluffed-out flame.
Still bag-like and sift, the local light of personality waits on the sofa for a soda. The stones tear at my
blue-striped job-hunting jacket, which I remove and throw into a floppy disk drive
The abominable snowmen still don’t know what to do about the lightning. Heads open at the top –
flakes updraft, in the bill-thick half-plops cracking; the neck of the river holds it together, glugs.
How like the moment the quake goes around the equator in no time – its old weight rubbing against the
marble.
2.
A sponge for insight isn’t carbon-quick enough to counter this coolly calculated warmed-up simile. It
grows filaments and forms stone dressing.
Between the collapsed cake of root energies to the tangled halo, its secrets are lodged protectively in
the kidney. The leaves split off from the slice of pizza. The star writhes in the stiffening cheese.
Saddled with moving-day clutter, a stick figure crawls out from the toroid pool. The guitar-hole flings its
garlands of ball-pointed bed springs about. An anatomical torso counters with cash.
Such perseverance and devotion, with face hints in the thicket, that steam up from twigs forming a
shawl-cloud – except where the bottom pool has formed a wheel over the torus (always a torus).
Ivars Balkits has retired as a writing tutor and course facilitator at Ohio University whose prose and poetry have been published on various literary journal web sites. He is a recipient of two Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, for poetry in 1999 and creative nonfiction in 2014.
Fixator Press 