Haunted
Passages:
Douglas
Cole
Fugitive
These junkyards at the edge of cities,
towers of wrecks, cars with blood
still on the driver seat, the windshield—
I am looking for a water pump, a new heart.
The raw road, the gravel pit,
the trailer where I get my insurance
from a salesman heavy with gold chains.
No one around here remembers rain.
I am a drive-through ghost.
Aren’t we all? This isn’t even,
now, a little kumquat garden,
an electric pool you can dive into
and feel the eel-tingle of skin life.
Throw the couch and the bones
into the dumpster—there is no
universal law that says you must
divulge your whereabouts.
So we fly on—imagine mist
inventing a new identity to escape
the investigators, so that when
a registered letter arrives say
you don’t know, that it’s a mistake
that person hasn’t lived here for years.
Douglas Cole published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has been anthologized in Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications), Bully Anthology (Kentucky Stories Press), and Coming Off the Line (Main Street Rag Publishing). He is a regular contributor to Mythaxis, providing essays and interviews with notable writers, artists, and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blonde, Flash Count Diary), and Tim Reynolds (TR3, Dave Matthews Band). He also writes a monthly piece called “Trading Fours” for Jerry Jazz Musician and was recently named the editor for “American Poetry” in Read Carpet, an international, multi-lingual journal from Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, he was awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry, the Editors’ Choice Award for fiction by RiverSedge, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is douglastcole.com.
Image: pca.org
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
Heavy Feather Review 