Soul Brawl

By Andrew Najberg

You’re not dead yet,
so there’s that
though the day’s
not done
and it's just bare
bones and bare feet
in the soil
under leaf-stripped
branches
in the soul

every fight waged
in hospital beds
digs deeper
than bare knuckle
and white sheets
checked in that hotel
where doors
sleep in empty rooms
unlocked
and always lit

and you know they’re
talking about you,
those machines
with lights
and numbers
and scribbling
needles, bellows
that pump sighs
and IVs that drip
life in cubic millimeters

but you’re fading by
inches and no one’s
ever agreed on a
unit of measurement
for the length
of a moment collapsing
into a white speck
caught in a trunk
creaking breeze.

In the sky
over I75 south,
A meteor falls.
It’s more than
a shooting star,
a white streak
so fast I’m done
seeing it before
I know I saw it

Somewhere
on a hillside,
it lodges.
Somewhere
the grass burns.
Wherever
that is,
A tree nearby
with cracked
bark all over.

There, that is
the place where
there is heat,
nascent, burgeoning.
A flicker
in the dark
among the grasses
and brush,
Soon smoke,
fire, then ash.

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Andrew Najberg is the author of The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks (Finishing Line Press, 2021) and Easy to Lose (Finishing Line Press, 2008).  His poems have appeared in North American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Nashville Review, Louisville Review, Istanbul Review, Bat City Review, and many other journals online and in print.