Gabriel Welsch
Selected Poems
Gabriel Welsch
Each Night
on the Fire Escape Above the Blue Note
I hear the bar’s piano trio and fight
my better sense of what is right
and so do not call you text you yell to you
something that feels like love
in the yearning bright against the penumbra
of gin and its briny accoutrements.
Is your husband still away, I wonder.
Does the house creak with the empty
promise of opportunity, do your hands
embrace what I covet, do the sounds
of a slumbering neighborhood cover
the allure of far-away sirens and the close
lights of a city fighting its own sleep?
Do your songs sing beyond what your voice
can cast? I sip gin, bracing, the cold
a balm for the warmth eluding me
and the face I picture crackling
in the ice, in the trees, in the sky clear
as a promise we simply cannot make,
the blue an atmosphere only present
when we return, burning.
Gabriel Welsch
Where the
Heart Is
What I see stays—door shadowed with vines.
Highway bridges burgundy at the state line.
First steel flare outside the tunnel,
each shoulder of the Appalachian ridges
I cross to home and home and home.
The filth-bronzed linoleum, lilac clapboards
rippling with damp. The silvery leather peeling
from the gear shift. The rust where city water
filled the basement on the coldest day that year.
Innumerable faces, petals on a famous bough—
a mud-stippled feather facing the sky,
a blue depth of want. And night
amid the deep fronds and seedclouds
broad as the field is rich. Loam-smell
a vision of hands seeking to join—
and then the lip, its flourish and sweep,
the cleft broken in a bloom of joy.
What I see stays—and a life paints
itself where I look and let rest eyes
that remember home and home and home.
Gabriel Welsch is the author of a collection of short stories, Groundscratchers, and four collections of poems, the latest of which is The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. Recent work appears in Southern Humanities Review, Chautauqua, Cloudbank, Summerset Review, Pembroke Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his family, and works at Duquesne University.
Featured in:
Red Rock Review
Issue 53