Poetry of the People Featuring Adam Houle

My fifth Poet of the People is Adam Houle. Adam's voice is nuanced and immediately relatable; he is refreshingly unpretentious in communicating what he sees.

Bio: Adam Houle is the author of Stray (Lithic Press), a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. His poems have appeared in AGNI, Shenandoah, The Shore, and elsewhere. He co-edits 12 Mile Review with Robert Kendrick and is an assistant professor at Francis Marion University.

Hearing About the Wreck

Now I’m off the phone and pacing while my wife,

seven states away, waits in the smashed car

to relay the incident’s specifics to a bored cop

at the intersection of two wide and busy roads.

It’s a sunbaked Texas town where, I imagine,

the woman who t-boned her sizes up

the grill guard with her pea-patch husband,

both of whom are already scum of the earth,

idiot scum of the earth. Inattentive texting

while driving scum of the earth, who were posting

driving selfies or twitter polls seeking counsel

on which fast food value meal they should shovel

down their maws, chewing with their mouths open

in the living room of what I’m sure is the saddest

half a duplex in all the republic of Texas

while SVU airs and they rubberneck a gruesome case.

In another world, my wife is dead, her body

wrecked in the wreck, and that world chaffs too close

and though she’s fine, alive, shaken but fine fine fine

I’m crying and say aloud, I’d kill them both,

and in that moment, when just moments before

I debated alone paint shades for our kitchen

and asked the dogs what would be the ecological fallout

if a barred owl fell in love with a red-tailed hawk,

I’m pretty sure I mean it, which scares me

in the way it must scare the tv star

who tilts a conversion van off a crushed friend

or rushes back for an heirloom when the foundation beams

have already burst, flames rising from the floor

like geysers, the expected feats of fear and rage,

who realizes there’s another self

that sleeps and, when it wakes, is more terrifying

and courageous and, I see, more cruel, with a drill bit heart

that turns faster and with more bite the more it hurts.

Is he a necessary self? Sometimes, love is the right spring

babbling, bubbling over moss, feeding meadow reeds.

Sometimes, it’s an errant left turn and the sun burning

down the westbound lane fracturing light through a windshield’s

sheen of dead bugs. I sat there a long time,

I made a fist, I released a fist. I breathed.

A fist. I breathed. This fist. My heart’s modeled after it.

Open, it’s to hold or offer.

Closed, oh god of the plains, and I am your vicious club.

 

(First appeared in Baltimore Review, Winter 2019)

~~~

It’s an Empty-Headed Move I Love the Most

 I swear I’ll leave your ass in Tennessee

with the trumpet vines and BarcaLoungers

slumping under carports. Maybe at a BP

near the bottom of a hill, where a state road

curves that way and a sandy one cuts back.

 

Maybe there next week, I’ll leave your ass.

You can throw your hands up all you want,

cinematic like, dramatic, your rage so quick

to bloom you’ll smash your phone to bits

before you’ll call me. You can be happy

 

in the injustice of all that balance:

a thought forms and then rejects itself, lizards grow

by eating the gray skins they have outgrown.

The dog, Caesar said, is cat. The jelly jar is cracked

and that your one good glass. Alas, I guess,

 

is a thing you’d say. Cross a river. Then another

or the oxbow bend of the same. It doesn’t matter.

The world reaps what the world repeats.

It’s natural as nature to always feel afraid,

to keep playing, even when you’ve been outplayed.

 

(First appeared in Phoebe, 52.1)


In Service

Bless this moment before the hydraulic door

sighs open. Bless the tamped heel click

on the low knap carpet. Bless the medicine

cart its quiet wheels. Bless how it feels

to watch your face attenuate as the glass

levers inward. Bless its disappearance

and the hall that takes its place. Bless this:

mylar balloons taped to temporary name plates

along the corridor. Bless late comforts. Bless night

nurses ending another shift. Bless their laughter.  

 

(First appeared in Chattahoochee Review, Spring 2020)

Epitaph

the sky my mind

my heart an ocean

here’s an antidote

go find the poison