Thresholds and Other Poems. Matt Hohner

twelve times the speed of sound.

      Data smeared across radar and heaven,

      a brushstroke of dust on the edge of moment

      glares, gleams, and streaks toward home.

      Dundalk

      Slow burn of rust across the eyelids of old men

      decades out of the plant, rooted on torn leather stools

      in the darklight at Minnick’s, underneath the shadows

      of the Seagram’s plant’s hulking brickwall desolation

      and splintered floors echoing junkies and johns having sex.

      A left shoe soaking in the rain out back of Penn Central,

      where the creosote odor of rotting ties wraps around

      a white wooden cross, Too Soon inscribed across its chest,

      poking stark like bones out of the needles and potato chip bags

      in the trackside weeds. A three-legged mongrel tightens

      at the end of its chain in a dirt yard, barks all night

      at trains rumbling slowly east past tenements and tents,

      pounding through the neighbors’ alcohol sleep.

      A wet easterly breath off the water, carrying the sewage

      stench of the treatment plant, mudflats of dumped tires

      at low tide, the dry hack of toxic dust over Bear Creek

      from the tailings of Sparrows Point’s last convulsive blasts

      of furnace and steel, over mercury sludge hiding enough crabs

      for someone to pull out on chicken necks, steam for dinner,

      ignore the metallic taste, swig it down with beer.

      The children raise themselves in anger and show up

      for school doped on mom’s pills, unshowered and late,

      cussing like absentee longshoremen fathers they never met,

      hope flickering there behind dark inlets of eyes seeking love,

      heartbeats begging routine, arms flailing for a hug

      and punching at walls they cannot see. Tough.

      Scratch it. Underneath the skin, Job’s blood courses

      through lava veins where it is still warm, the soul breathing,

      singing in joy at dawn for the promise of another day,

      clamoring through all the damage to a heart still beating

      to the rhythm of lunar ebbs, shift whistles, stirring to the sound

      of acrid cloudsmoke scraping across an impossible sky.

      The Maximum Effective Range

      for the victims at Virginia Tech, April 16, 2007

      The diameter of the bullet is .22 inches

      and the distance of its maximum effective range

      is thirty yards, but further when fired by anger

      fueled with paranoia, curving with the earth,