TWO POEMS

by Chris Hosea

I’m Lovin’ It

I speak to it, and it never talks back.
I see it disappear and change me.
But it’s always there.
I can’t remember a life without it.
My father didn’t have to tell me never to forget it.
It is understood wordlessly, like a stone wall.
It keeps me straight in this place.
In the most crowded room, nobody can come between it
and me.
It’s inside of me, purring like a pacemaker.
It’s not something you can explain on a first date.
People lie and say they don’t need it,
leaning on it even as they say “no.”
It is made by people hidden away far in the night.
How could they be nothing like me?
I am no one and it is everything.
Not of my flesh, it is my flesh.

Keep Walking

A familiar crux,
the mind body one—
might it be no more
than a foretaste
of the tomb’s boredom?

I prefer remembered scents
of apple juice
and jute mats
on a sun-spangled seventies forenoon,
the part-time guru in Miss Griffin’s class
inviting us into meadows
behind our restless eyes
where there are too many flowers to count
and, almost silently, a spring runs
blurring lines that mark off fields,
making grasses green.

BIO

Chris Hosea is from Princeton, NJ. For the last 4 years he has lived in an apartment overlooking the grave of Emily Dickinson. He has an MFA in Poetry
from the University of Massachusetts. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Harvard Review, The Literary Review, New Voices. He lives in Northampton, MA and can be reached at chosea@gmail.com