Featured Writer
Jason Roberts
Jason Roberts is a 2000 graduate of Amory High School; a
2004 graduate of Northwest Community College with an
automotive technology degree; a summa cum laude graduate
of MSU with a bachelor of arts in English. His poem,
"Apropos of Hell" won awards in both the MSU
undergraduate writing contest and the Southern Literary
Festival.
Apropos of Hell
Some night,
my mother comes crawling,
out of the piano
she left in the corner of the room.
She reads from a list,
a small collection of my insignificant childhood sins,
like the time I threw a rock
and knocked my little brother from his bike,
and how the blood and gravel caked his cheeks,
and how I told him I hoped he died without any friends...
but she forgets,
that she was the one who taught me how to lie to my father
about the doctors she saw while he was at work
or the medicines she took.
She tells me that before I was born,
the only think she thought about at three o'clock in the morning,
on an empty highway in Louisiana, where the air is never cool,
or at five a.m. in southern Florida, where the swamp ash trees sit
content
in the contract of black on black, water on sky, before the sun
comes up
or anywhere, playing piano in house band,
...was leaving.
and this is my cue - to go to her
silently.
knowing we must go back together,
she never hesitates.
Taking me by the hand, we slowly,
magnificently,
like royalty,
descend.
Into the coffin made of sound.
Each note, a memory, a regret or two or two hundred,
a trap to keep me there until God has time to judge me,
Her tongue, gathering speed, like the bending of reeds
in a storm,
she tells me that our lives are unfinished songs,
solar winds winding shoddily along,
in an old brown van, across a rolling wasteland
that is the thin line between Americana and junk,
leaving philosophy under the decaying orange glow
of the last street lamp. the last town. the last band. the next
town. the next band.
And finally, lying together and twisted,
to fit the shape inside the piano,
like her mother's broken clock's hands in the bottom of a glass jar,
she assures me,
They don't make angels where we're going.
|