JONATHAN DUCKWORTH

Awake at 4am

The Texas night is an atom bomb of potentiality,
& a cricket in the bush outside reminds us both

he exists. In these quiet hours I can pretend
the suburbs fall away to unspoiled wildness,

to land unparcelled, free of power lines, gas lines,
red lines; streets, alleys gone, & no farm-to-market roads,

because the farms & markets are abolished,
reeled back into primordial sprawl of chaparral.

When I hear the train lowing somewhere far,
it's not man-laid tracks of iron & deadwood ties it trundles

but instead a mast of pecan, acorn, & hickory
churned to wake the musk of the world's marrow,

& the locomotive recollects its wooly paleolithic coat
& wheels turn again to hooves & links dissolve,

the iron vertebra becomes the herd again, buffalo
charge to reclaim a space both past & future,

& all this is beautiful but still I can't rest, still
I'm awake, & what should be a quiet median

between the angst of two election year days
is just more of the same. & the cricket won't shut up.

But the unseen night is good. Still I love
the harvest moon that steals through my curtains.

Mosquitoes teem; their lanceolate larvae swim
the moonlight puddled in acorn caps.

Jonathan Louis Duckworth received his MFA from Florida International University. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in New Ohio Review, Gulf Coast, Bayou, Barrelhouse, Tupelo Quarterly, Superstition Review, and elsewhere, and his chapbook Book of Never was published by Finishing Line Press. He has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. He is a PhD student at University of North Texas.