Confession to Montgomery, Asleep on the Church Steps
by Robert Okaji
If I walk quietly by
it is not to avoid disturbing you,
but rather myself. What
could I give you
but another bagel, the
boiled dough of nothingness
rising in cloudy water,
delaying, perhaps, another
guilty twinge. You have no
answers but when you
speak to the air, sometimes
a smile creaks through
the broken words, and I
think even in this cloistered
darkness we may close
the circle between halves
and might-have-beens,
an understanding, if only
in the language of bread
and coffee and the
disregarded. But today I stride
on, without pause, counting
on nothing that can’t be
pocketed or spoken aloud,
my steps echoing softly
down the alley and its secrets,
along the crosswalk’s painted
guides, under the sagging
power lines and through
your streetlight’s dim halo.
Robert Okaji lives in Texas. The author of five chapbooks, most recently I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press, 2019), his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Panoply, Riggwelter, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere.
by Robert Okaji
If I walk quietly by
it is not to avoid disturbing you,
but rather myself. What
could I give you
but another bagel, the
boiled dough of nothingness
rising in cloudy water,
delaying, perhaps, another
guilty twinge. You have no
answers but when you
speak to the air, sometimes
a smile creaks through
the broken words, and I
think even in this cloistered
darkness we may close
the circle between halves
and might-have-beens,
an understanding, if only
in the language of bread
and coffee and the
disregarded. But today I stride
on, without pause, counting
on nothing that can’t be
pocketed or spoken aloud,
my steps echoing softly
down the alley and its secrets,
along the crosswalk’s painted
guides, under the sagging
power lines and through
your streetlight’s dim halo.
Robert Okaji lives in Texas. The author of five chapbooks, most recently I Have a Bird to Whistle (Luminous Press, 2019), his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Panoply, Riggwelter, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere.