by Justin Carter
Listening To The DVD Menu For Red Vs. Blue Repeat All Night At Joey’s Birthday Party
We aren’t all alive anymore.
If we’d known, then,
how one of us
would succumb
to our modern plague,
maybe we wouldn’t
have drifted
to uncomfortable sleep
on couches, floors, guest beds.
Maybe we’d have stayed up
until the sun hung back
in the then-marvelous sky,
our hands on Halo controllers,
our laughter its own
kind of contagion.
But no one knows
what the future holds—
I could die right now,
the sound of Miss Rachel
the last thing entering these ears.
I could live forever,
though it seems unlikely.
I can still hear the gunshots
of the DVD menu
echoing through
the dark room
but I’ll never know
if I was the only one
kept awake by the noise.
Maybe we all were.
Maybe we were too afraid
to break the silence.
Thinking About The Tim McGraw Album Set This Circus Down (2001)
The commercials aired constantly
though I struggle, now,
to recall the specifics—
only the chorus of the title track,
only this little ghost of a memory.
My parents had a water bed
& on Sunday mornings
I’d join them
to watch country music videos
on CMT &, well—
did we watch GAC too?
Or, by the time
our cable company added it,
had the future splintering
of our family taken hold:
everything replaced
by quiet or shouts.
It’s another piece of my own history
that’s managed to escape my grasp.
Hearing Booty Wurk While Walking My Son Down The Greenbelt Trail
It’s cold & getting colder. We’ve just turned around
underneath 73rd Street to return
to the brewery where my wife is waiting,
& over the sound of rabbits diving through grass
& the rustling wings of what could be
a bird or what could be a bat,
comes the unmistakeableness of T-Pain—
& now I’m back in Whitney’s garage
surrounded by people who weren’t strangers then
but are strangers now—lawyers & filmmakers
& plant workers & cops, all these phantoms
listening through a busted iPod speaker dock—
& here I am, now, in Iowa, 986 miles
from there, & “Booty Wurk” is fading into the distance.
Justin Carter is the author of Brazos. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, he currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.