Page 44 - The Woven Tale Press Vol. IV #9

BrIAN BeAtty
Safe Houses
An old wristwatch stripped of its broken band ticks away, a bomb
in the kitchen junk drawer.
Nobody hears it except me.
I listen to the twine and hammer, too. As hobbies go
Welcome Home
mine, I admit,
is pretty mundane.
A pack of barking strays
chases the mystic
circling the grocery store parking lot on a bicycle too big for him.
I nest in this chair like a crow.
He’s a boy of nine or ten
with a fresh yellow haircut pedaling as fast as he can. Fleas on the dogs are dizzy
with the excitement of today’s pursuit. Shoppers drop their brown paper bags and stare.
They all see the future in his face.
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Beatty’s poems and stories have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including The Bark, Conduit, Dark Mountain (England), The Evergreen Review, Forklift Ohio, The Glasgow Review of Books (Scotland), Great Walks (Australia), Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Mid- western Gothic, The Moth (Ireland), Opium, Paper Darts, Phoebe, The Quarterly, Seventeen, Southern Poetry Review and The Sycamore Review.
Beatty is the author of the collections Coyotes I Couldn’t See (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and Brazil, Indiana (Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press, forthcoming).