Sean McDowell

A boy a girl a garden:
it always begins something like this.
You awaken to find rock still pliant
from the Creator's hand, the stars burning free in the twilight
...

We put our weapons in the trunk––
a wood staff, two metal bats, & a BB-gun
shaped like a Luger––
& set out for Lincoln Park in Trevor's '94 Firebird.
...

You had crouched to trace out a footprint in compact ice
with fingertips too frozen to feel,
glancing up at me and saying confidently,
'Two of them, probably infantry, traveling light, heading east
...

I set the brightness to one bar
and see in the face that slides onto the paper tray
the moment before Hiroshima
flickered––the eyes narrowing, diminishing to pupils
...

i am one of the few who was left behind
to lay his head in these forsaken lands. one of the few
who still awakens each day
to watch the half-completed structure
...

I would have followed his arc
through the heavens, shrugged off the warnings of my father
and crossed into the vastness of the world,
but I would have left him
...

My mother stands, her back to me, watching
the wind stir her garden. Years ago,
I would have said that she saw traces of God,
her thought being that He left Eden to stroll in her creation.
...

––hands folded behind my head, awake at 2 am
on an old mattress
that will retain my form long after I rise.
I watch rain stagger down my window,
...

When I woke today, I shook Eden from my head,
and in its place I found a story
I'd heard as a child:
of a man long ago who lost everything,
...

Should you chase the unwritten pages,
the spaces left beyond
the lines where words could no longer sustain thought,
you will find me.
...