"Turpentine", "Roth IRA", "Anywhere Like Tomorrow", "What's Left to Give", "Bulbs" & "Gills" by KG Newman

Turpentine

I am stealing a pine tree:

Blimp as my getaway vehicle: 

In this velocity of recklessness,

lighting matches in the ether

only for the smoke 

and possibility of explosion.

When I get back down

I bite the heads of flowers

to make room for the new/

used roots in my yard.

I do not think of how quickly

pink evaporates from above

the mountains in the morning

or of windows that neither

open nor close. I dirty 

my hands and rock forever 

on a porch choked with

bindweed. Wait for, then out, 

and then through winter again 

as I distill from my thieved tree and

come to see myself as an orange 

in perfectly untouched snow.

Roth IRA

I stuff my spare dollars into

a coffee can until I can afford her

an old, beautiful bridge

which we’ll walk over to a ghost coaster

in a nearby slice of quiet rural

urban sprawl somehow overlooked.

This is not about the people we were

when we let fear undress us

or the mess we made with chains of

unhinged texts. It is just

a red button which I hit repeatedly

with a long stick; rickety restraints.

The bridge crumbling into water

by the brick as our screams 

unfurl into nothingness to atone for

mugs once left so full, and cold.

Anywhere Like Tomorrow

A rubber duckie floating down the gutter in a rainstorm 

and a barrel of incense at my door

waiting for a flame: 

That’s what this year has been. 

Eating juicy steaks at the table with my hood on. 

Later, doing my best Duke Ellington impression

by sitting shirtless in bed downing four pints

of mint ice cream. Dreams evolving from

habit. Seeing the beauty in winter foliage

while never losing the longing for summer.

Streams running after the black moon

like the duckie guns toward the sewer.

If only I had a rainboot to stop it or

an everlasting prop to dam the water

and cause me to realize that all the

twined sunflowers in the world

will still turn brown long before 

January, ready to become a tea.

What’s Left To Give

Play-Doh left open for a year

or as long as you want:

There is no floor to the universe

or limit on mask words like Oh,

great to utter when planting

the mums ends with stepping

on a praying mantis. Amid this

a purge arrives at your drawers

and no loved graphic tee is safe.

Shirtless fathers tuck in sons

under a sky of plastic stars.

We are all ghost-hopping 

sunrises. Finding the lid to 

the tub of blood-orange Doh 

just to use it as a coaster.

Bulbs

Along the windy two-lane death trap

leading to my house out in the country

there’s a seedling in the middle of a field 

lit up in a strand of red and green and blue

that always gives me hope

that I too am capable of running

the county’s longest extension cord

down from the porch where I sit alone

and watch trees content with darkness,

ready to swallow the stars whole.

Gills

I am most comfortable struggling to breathe 

under a pile of couch pillows with two sons

heaped on top and our search-and-rescue dog

sticking his snout into a tiny crevice between

the padded tan squares. This is where

I do not care about fistfuls of ephemerals

or pulsars titled away from us. With 

stilted inhales I just focus on what’s left

of the half-lives of their invented portmanteaus. 

I picture a fishing line untangling itself in a

refracted river. Where there’s two honest clouds 

in the sky and a faded johnboat on the shore, 

tied to a mossy stump. An open invitation 

for open air and a hover of rainbow trout 

praying for bait. The grip of small hands.

KG Newman is a sportswriter for The Denver Post. His first five poetry collections are available on Amazon and he has been published in scores of literary journals worldwide. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He is the poetry editor of Hidden Peak Press and he lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.