Poetry by C.W. Blackwell

               ​Tony Webster CC



Above The World So High

He shoulders off the bus with
nothing to his name but a 
soft pack of Camel Lights and
a brass Zippo he stole 
from a convenience store 
outside Elko, Nevada.

Shadows haunt his eyes.

She imagines ghosts escorting
him down the bus stairwell, 
crowding the sidewalk
as he smokes away the last
three-hundred miles of icy highway.

He asks about the boy:

the one with his grandmother’s 
eyes and her father's complexion
who is kind to spiders 
and hugs too hard
and pronounces els like double-Us 
and wants Pluto to be a planet again

—but after five years
he doesn’t know much of that.

All he wants to know
is which lullaby she sings 
when only a song will do,
so she tells him
about little stars and how they
               twinkle 
               like 
               diamonds
and she offers a thrift store coat
with a plane ticket to Boise
tucked away in the breast pocket.

A quick goodbye and
he disappears in the turnstile
with his entourage of ghosts
and when she returns home, 
she finds the boy in the backyard 
watching airplanes
cast vapor trails
above the world so high.

C.W. Blackwell is an American crime fiction author and poet. His recent poetry has appeared in Close to the Bone's 4.4 Series, Versification, The Five-Two, Punk Noir, and Dead Fern Press. His upcoming poetry collection, River Street Rhapsody, will appear in Spring 2022 from Dead Fern Press.

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