Poetry

Poems by John Brooks

Poems by John Brooks

♦
Summer 2023 ♦
Met In an orca-colored room, we glare into a jungle which is actually Paris. I tell you I loved Rousseau when I was a young man; I am a young man and love Rousseau, you say. His half-coy beast, concerned with repast and eyeing something delicious on Bonnard’s adjacent terrace,…
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Treebeard

Treebeard

♦
Summer 2021 ♦
It now appears that certain trees lower and raise their branches, not only at nightfall or sunrise, but also with shorter periods, such as two hours. It’s as if they have an internal heartbeat. —The Scientific and Medical Network Journal, 2018.   busy as we are we feel your longing…
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Queers on the Oregon Trail

Queers on the Oregon Trail

♦
Winter 2021 ♦
to Oregon I’m relentless: on holidays I pull at your shawl and beg you to play settler as the men down- stairs pray for our souls long before we understand what it means to be queers.  even the room is magic: austere, New England white, snow-lined sill mapping  the cylinder…
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How to make loss real

How to make loss real

♦
Fall 2020 ♦
Picture someone you love. Maybe your wife, the way she smells when she steps out of the shower, her hair dripping. Imagine her scrunching those strands with a towel, then rubbing lotion onto her thirsty limbs. See her wrapping that towel around her, tucking the ends into the towel dress…
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Circa 1994

Circa 1994

♦
Fall 2020 ♦
after Jason Isbell’s “The Life You Choose” It wasn’t Jack and Coke, it was Southern Comfort in Taco Bell cups full with ice, no doubt on our way to another viewing of Pulp Fiction or to Hoover Reservoir to steam windows and dream of big cities and rock stars and riot…
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honey boy, honey boy

honey boy, honey boy

♦
Summer 2020 ♦
you’re a demigod, honey boy:             a refrain of affirmation though dulcet still             you’re just human learn not to rely on sight             because it’s only clear too late, looking back follow the scent…
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