Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

 

Epimetheus in the Fall of the Year

 

I’m suffering my own mid-winter butchering.

My little kids sleep. My wife grocery getting.

Cat getting fucked behind the garage.

 

Destiny appeared backwards in me,

A resolution to return to the scene,

Someone for whom the howling of a train

 

Is most cleanly meant: desperately known

After it passes, all the moonlit roofs shaken,

Mortgaged suburban American hearts.

 

What if we died with the end of December,

Reborn on the first, forgetful and joyous

Rosy-cheeked myth? From out of our

 

Cedar closets old swords and sandals dragged

To the light, bright shifts for our fully-hydrated

Bodies, no one coming up short. Pour the dregs,

 

Sigh, and watch the year’s best highlights

Replay, satellite by satellite, fantasize what

It would have been like had we been there,

 

The empire of the beginning of it all.

I’m suffering my own mid-winter butchering,

The cat at the door, the heart in her mouth.

 

Jacob Strautmann’s debut book of poems The Land of the Dead Is Open for Business is available from Four Way Books, and his second book New Vrindaban is forthcoming in Fall 2024. Jacob Strautmann’s poems have appeared in The Boston Globe, The Appalachian Journal, Southern Humanities Review, and Blackbird. www.jacobstrautmann.com

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx