Kevin Nance

Meanwhile

These are the lives we’ve been given,
all these bright shining mornings
& dark starless nights, all these damned & beloved children
lost & found & found & lost,
all these tears.

Of course there’s no changing the past
no matter what color glasses
we look at it through, nor is there any confusion
about where we’re headed, only how we’ll get there
& when.

Till then, the world is harsh & cold
but for what we bring to it in our little rooms,
the cups of coffee we pour each other
& warm our hands with, the cream & the sugar,
the barely burnt crusts of bread.

Under the Hood

He was always there under the hood,
working on whatever piece-of-shit Ford or Chevy
we were stuck with that year. Peering at the dipstick,
splashing gasoline in the hacking carburetor,
fiddling with the hoses. The adjustable wrench
was always losing its grip, his knuckles skinned
& caked with blood, the bill of his baseball cap
smudged with carbon. Muttered curses streamed
from his mouth like fumes threatening to ignite,
one eye shut against the smoke drifting up
from the cigarette clenched in his teeth,
the ash flaring orange with each breath in.
Who knew when this engine might throw a rod
& self-combust, or was it just a worn-out muffler,
blowing smoke? Either way, my mother and I stayed
out of reach. We knew firsthand what sparks could fly
if you connected the battery cables the wrong way
& what could boil over when the radiator got hot,
when you had to sit for a while & let it cool down
before you took off its cap.

Kevin Nance is a poet, arts journalist, and photographer in Lexington, Kentucky. His two collections of photographs and haiku are Even If (University of Kentucky Arts in HealthCare, 2020) and Midnight (Act of Power Press, 2022). His free verse has appeared in The North American Review, Poet Lore, and Cumberland Poetry Review which awarded him the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize in 2003. His new poetry collection, Smoke, is forthcoming this summer from Accents Publishing.