Poetry by Jesse Millner

     Ravi Shah CC




There was a bar

I went to in Lakeview called “Frank’s,” and it was
the last stop on my tavern tour home from Wrigley
so, my remembrance of the joint is kind of slurred,
though in writing this I do remember the bar
that went the length of the room and the urinal
in the bathroom that always overflowed, and how
draft Old Styles were really cheap.  It’s amazing
I can remember anything at all after all the drinking:
Pregame beers at home in the backyard, then sipping brews
the six-block walk to the ballpark, then a 16 oz beer
each inning and by the sixth, maybe two at a time,
then Clark’s, the Cubby Bear, the Piano Man, all filled
with post-game drinkers, and then, at last, onward
to the last station, Frank’s, at the cross streets of Wayne
and Addison where I’d drink like a sailor who been long
at sea, or like a pilgrim who’d been lost in a desert 
and now had a powerful thirst to kill all the sorrow, 
and silence all the bad prophets, all the would-be saviors, 
with as much booze as it took.  The sadness 

always returned at 2 am, when 
I woke up on the couch with all my clothes on 
and the late traffic murmured
on Addison Street and I’d trudge to the fridge,
find a cold Budweiser, pull the tab, and drink it down
in furious gulps. I’d lie on the couch, a little buzzed
but not quite drunk, temporarily relieved of the thirst
that had awakened me to this world of half light
and the awareness that I was broken, which might
seem like a cliché, but I tell you, man, my spirit
was crushed and a tide of emptiness washed over
me, again and again like the swish
and swoosh of an ocean where I’m standing
ankle deep in the surf, looking out toward
the horizon where a single freighter
is lit up in the darkness like a Christmas tree.
                                




Our Own Tiny Fires

Once I had a mind of winter
and I’d been cold a long, long time.
But I live in Florida now, where winters
are mild and the cold is not something
that stiffens and paralyzes an entire landscape
like those days I lived in Chicago
when humans wandered to the White Hen
for morning coffee and darkened the linoleum floors
with sludge from the parking lot.  Maybe they
bought a scratch off ticket and hoped for a miracle?
Maybe they bought cigarettes and walked outside
to make their own tiny fires in defiance of the cold?
Maybe they became little chimneys themselves
sending grey smoke into the heavens, signaling
despair over this world of snow zigzagged 
with trails of dog piss and shoved into piles
at the end of sidewalks where the beer cans
glisten in the sun? I have seen

Januarys in Chicago where the whole world 
shone in magnificent light, seemingly pure
in the incandescent cold. When I breathed,
the air took my breath away, like a hard kind of love,
and when I looked north toward Wisconsin, I saw 
the black branches of dead trees reaching skyward 
in supplication to the season’s terrible god.  I have seen

snow cover an urban world for so many
miles, you might forget that it’s really of landscape
of asphalt and concrete, of houses and factories
and bowling alleys and gas stations that stay open
no matter the weather. And taverns, too, where
I spent many a stormy night with my hands
Resting on a knife-nicked bar. I read inscriptions
Of love for Mary, amidst the occasional fuck you
And complaint about how everything sucks,
Which might have been true, but was not
The complete truth: The world is sorrow
And beauty, it is rain and cold and spit,
It is the stumbling down darkened city
Alleys where lost dogs howl plaintively
At the full moon, which like most things
Will be sliced up, halved and quartered
Until the moment it almost disappears. 

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Death Car

Goddamn it, make my death car a 1962 Impala,
its hood ornament glimmering in southern moonlight
as I navigate narrow country roads 
decades from being paved, crisscrossing 
hollows, pastures and woods where the world 
is still beautiful, and yes, the whippoorwills sing 
from the forest floor like dark angels whispering 
the real gospel, the terrifying truth that 
burns like fire or like battery acid 
through whatever lies our human 
hearts have been telling, those
stories of faith and resurrection, those tales 
of any meaning other than dirt, the truth 
of earth itself, aerated by worms and seasoned 
with the steady accumulation
of dying things rotting into the strange soil 
that will ignite seeds into living things 
like flowers, trees, and all manner of grasses.

In my death car, I want a plastic Jesus 
dangling from the rearview
mirror, which catches moonlight and headlights 
as the starlight falls across the fields and valleys of this wondrous 
place I am driving through. My radio fixed 
on a station that plays nothing but Patsy Cline 
and an occasional song by Marty Robbins that bleed 
out of open windows and into the trembling
dark that is about to give birth 
to at least a hundred sorrows, because
this is, indeed, the business of every
night, to churn out loneliness and despair
beneath the burning constellations.

O night, after the engine on my death car
cracks its final piston, after wisps of grey 
blossom from the engine block,
don’t let me be sent to my savior
who art in heaven, hallowed be his name,
the man-god, the carpenter, raiser of the dead.

Instead, let me be sent to that cafe
I loved on Halsted Street just north of Armitage
that had good coffee and whose walls were covered
with paintings by local artists who may not have been
very good but they were very earnest, and it was cool to sit
there in the early 1980s, sipping a latte and listening
to a local folk singer, who like the art, was very earnest.
Of course, lots of folks were smoking, so the walnut
bar and lumpy couches and chairs were softened
by the gray haze, and it was almost like the entire
café was the work of an earnest surrealist who knew
a good place when he painted it.

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Jesse Millner’s poems and prose have appeared most recently in Grist and The Southern Poetry Anthology: Virginia. His work was included in The Best American Poetry 2013 and Best Small Fictions 2020.  His latest poetry book, Memory’s Blue Sedan, was released in March 2020 by Hysterical Books of Tallahassee, Florida. Jesse teaches writing courses at Florida Gulf Coast University and lives in Estero, Florida.
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