Kevin A. Risner
Fireworks
This year turns into the hottest one ever. I predict thunderstorms as we follow the path to the park along the lake. It feels like carrying Atlas’s globe. I am crushed. I’m fooled into thinking the flashes in an olive dusk sky are distant lightning strikes. I tell my parents, we should go home!
My eyes dart in all directions, stay stuck upon a slice of sky over the lake. The Catherine Wheels, the crackles, the cherry bombs. They shake my body, thud against my chest.
After it’s all over, the smoke pours over us like a toxic cloud event. My dad wears a T-shirt proclaiming he survived the Lakewood 4th-of-July fireworks accident in 1982. I always ask him about that night when he wears it. We reach home, dry, safe.
+
My ceiling fan shakes hardest at midnight. My pores had opened like a geyser on the walk home. It’s easier when 77 degrees happens at noon.
I sleep on a mattress. Nothing else. Both windows in my room are open, letting all the crickets and the frogs’ croaks inside. I hear more bangs and shouts from afar. Fireworks should never explode at this time, every ten minutes after one a.m., surrounded by the tallest and driest trees.
The distant past haunts century homes. Foundations creak as if ghosts are sitting around laughing, shuffling cards, playing gin rummy until the world brightens again.
+
I took a vacation to the southern shores the first summer I lived in Istanbul, twelve years ago. We wove around cliffs in a rickety taxi van, my hands clinging to the seat in front of me. We crunched to a stop at Kabak. This was the town’s name – but it’s also a light-green squash, often stuffed with lamb.
No fireworks that July. I would have heard them at night if I were in Ohio. Instead, I sat in a treehouse with a smile, with nothing in my eardrums but guitars, with nothing in my hand but a bottle of Efes.
The surrounding forests met a peppery sky. There had been a new moon, a newborn silence lasting forever.
My eyes dart in all directions, stay stuck upon a slice of sky over the lake. The Catherine Wheels, the crackles, the cherry bombs. They shake my body, thud against my chest.
After it’s all over, the smoke pours over us like a toxic cloud event. My dad wears a T-shirt proclaiming he survived the Lakewood 4th-of-July fireworks accident in 1982. I always ask him about that night when he wears it. We reach home, dry, safe.
+
My ceiling fan shakes hardest at midnight. My pores had opened like a geyser on the walk home. It’s easier when 77 degrees happens at noon.
I sleep on a mattress. Nothing else. Both windows in my room are open, letting all the crickets and the frogs’ croaks inside. I hear more bangs and shouts from afar. Fireworks should never explode at this time, every ten minutes after one a.m., surrounded by the tallest and driest trees.
The distant past haunts century homes. Foundations creak as if ghosts are sitting around laughing, shuffling cards, playing gin rummy until the world brightens again.
+
I took a vacation to the southern shores the first summer I lived in Istanbul, twelve years ago. We wove around cliffs in a rickety taxi van, my hands clinging to the seat in front of me. We crunched to a stop at Kabak. This was the town’s name – but it’s also a light-green squash, often stuffed with lamb.
No fireworks that July. I would have heard them at night if I were in Ohio. Instead, I sat in a treehouse with a smile, with nothing in my eardrums but guitars, with nothing in my hand but a bottle of Efes.
The surrounding forests met a peppery sky. There had been a new moon, a newborn silence lasting forever.
Biography
|
Kevin A. Risner (he/him/his) recently published Five Seconds Could Last Five Years, a summer mixtape poetry collection. He also has poems in The Second Chance Anthology, a collection of re-homed work released by Variant Lit over the summer. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Glass, Mineral Lit Mag, Non.Plus Lit, Ocean State Review, Perhappened Mag, Signal Mountain Review and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @mr_december, on Instagram @kevinarisner, and on the web www.kevinarisner.com
|
