Benjamin Evans
Inchoate
for Paul Pickering
It was magnanimity—
the sun blasting over the diamond
where I used to play little league
as I drove past yesterday
after buying dandruff shampoo,
a plastic, electric kettle for tea
I drink to face the day,
the same day. For the first time,
I felt my age—eyes sallow
in the rearview, skin flaking.
I have said, in so many words,
I am dying. We were the Yellow
Dodgers, assembled shortly
after Ryan White contracted
AIDs. I had a teammate,
Nathan, who lent me his water
bottle after I'd circled the bases.
His father snatched it out
of my hand. People were scared.
I think of Ryan and our guilt—
the Midwest on full tilt. Scared,
oppressive openness. The lyric,
the white-gold of disappearance
on a Sunday night
hammering chain-link fences,
ropes over which my own ailing father
tripped. Blood on his elbow,
his chin. I'm fine. I'm fine.
He told us. Then, years later
died of it. He drove near
toward the end. They tried
to take away his license. Why do
I feel I'm reenacting a slow death?
That I owe him that same suffering?
It's the Midwest. Bad place
for the blessed, forge
to get out of, son
made to come back.
Benjamin Evans is the former editor of the nonprofit arts review, Fogged Clarity, and current head of "Light Lion Arts." he earned his MFA from the University of Oregon. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Poetry Northwest, Sugar House Review, The Cortland Review, and RHINO, among others.