Three poems by Jeremy Rock

Semantic

“And if the blood/ on your hands grows too dark,/
 think of the bright pail of milk, its froth,/ how you made
 something good/ long after the calf had grown/ cold”

-Susannah Nevison, “Pastoral”

As good a name as any other, how veal blossoms
 into brisket, kid to cutlet. A span drawn on the tongue
 from referent to tortile intent, a curtain always
 
 tugging back. As a life becomes more familiar, empathy
 begs its title be expelled far from center palate, diplomatic
 and foreign like something being done in the distance:
 
 unrecognizable, a perfect, perpetual tense free
 of blame. As though it was inevitable, some will have been
 running, hurting, eating, dying, no stretch of time
 
 before or after to contradict. If they can, they’ll have you
 believe in separation. In the difference between one sound
 and another, the metal truth penning like rail spikes
 
 or wire both sides of a line. Us and not us. Silence, then
 a mouth moves. The world starts to take shape around it.

Passing

Couched by the window, washed
 in the unmistakable distant timbre
 of train on track, marching snares
 dressed forward. A whistle pleads
 
 with distance to be close, to be present
 as thunder. Hear the blare of horn,
 five-alarming, barn-razing, pressed
 against silence like someone’s asleep
 
 on the rails and needs to flee. Breaths
 languor out, crossties braced for interstice.
 The sound grows less patient. Night
 allows, moment by moment, the padded,
 
 waning anticipation to stay in bloom.
 Come into this swanlight siren auric
 luster of apartment lantern wraithing
 through our dusty. Through our quiet.

Dehiscence

I never meant to plant this taste
 for capsules or tablets, for how I’ll rub
 a bloodstain into linen when I know
 
 I should blot. Hairshirt of watered
 coffee and sweating rooms, the smell
 of vague vinegar and hardwater
 
 germinating like a sunburn out
 of season. I try to think of icing
 these joints as a gift, the craft
 
 of an athlete or prospector weighing
 muscle like ore, adversarial to the veins
 and all the time they take to fill.
 
 How many times now
 I’ve drifted across bridges
 or dehydrated highways, not
 to taste a cure
 
 but something slimmer, more skeletal,
 around which I could frame
 a life. Always the season
 
 of reaped seeds I would never
 plant, sprouting buds like wild thyme
 as if I were a garden
 
 to be covered. A body
 at unrest, topography in relief.
 I rake my bonsai sand
 
 tight to the roots
 and filter this water
 in hopes fickle bark
 chooses to be kind.

Jeremy Rock is pursuing an MFA at the University of Alabama. He has work published or forthcoming in Poet Lore, The Shore, Bear Review, Sugar House Review, Cider Press Review, and elsewhere.