Illinois
It was gang of four
then it was the smoking popes
it was the one song by frightened rabbit
that I can't bring myself to listen to
(but will not stop singing)
It was someone else who said
"you don't understand how I love you"
when I had contingency plans,
before right and left hand
went separate ways
I was too busy building a reputation
to know what it meant
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A. Pennington-Flax lives, works, and occasionally reads poetry in front of people in central Illinois.
Every other summer our house would get hit by a tornado
That would dip into the valley of my parents’ backyard.
The first time my sister was paranoid because she lived through one
But I shrugged it off until the closed windows swoll and the plate flew out of the closed
microwave.
& it opened us up to what can go wrong in our world as the dog was sucked up from the deck
and I watched it through my basement window and told my little brothers, Don’t look out
there.
Their swing set was wrapped back to a tree and the trampoline floated down the
Mississippi
& it might still be there
I don’t know.
& they kept hitting.
& I went to Ireland
& didn’t hear from my family
But saw the pictures.
My mom wrote me
She had a bad feeling
& moved my records from her den the day before
The basketball hoop would have splintered the vinyl
Where it landed through the window
& I would have never came back.
-
Joshua Bohnsack is an MFA student at Northwestern University, a reader for TriQuarterly, and the managing editor for Curbside Splendor Publishing. He is the author of Shift Drink (Spork Press, forthcoming 2018) and Burnt Sienna (Throwback Books 2017). His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and others. He ran an ice cream shop in rural Illinois until he moved to Chicago. @joshuabohnsack