ROBERT BEVERIDGE - POEMS

Robert Beveridge (he/him) makes noise (xterminal.bandcamp.com) and writes poetry in Akron, OH. Recent/upcoming appearances in The Virginia Normal, Credo Espoir, and Chiron Review, among others.

CIRCLE IN THE SAND
​

I cannot tell you why
the lepidoptera do not fly south
for the winter, or why this goddamn song
is stuck in my head;
I can only tell you
about the things I know,
the creaminess of your shoulder's
skin beneath my fingers,
the tang of sweat on your cheek
when I kiss you,
the truth of how your body 
fits so well in my arms.

​

PSYCHOPOMP
​

when you look
at the screen
of the electron
microscope

sometimes you
see a microbe
with the face
of a bird

​

SHADOWPLAY: WEST OF THE MISSISSIPPI
​

The old barriers
are set adrift in banks
of clouds, opaque. They hang
over the river, sentries
who obscure the view:
and then we have passed
and we are here. West.

I have always thought
of Texas as red. In my youth
I had a plastic puzzle
of the states, put away
when by brother swallowed
Vermont. Texas was red,
and remained so for decades.
From miles up I see
what can only be Sam Houston
Race Park, with its lack
of turf course, surrounded
by green so dark it may
as well be Vermont, afterwards.

It fell away in tan
New Mexico. But desert
is not endless. It is broken
with green patches, pocked
with salt flats, quarries.
But dominant
was tan, sand and dirty roads
and fifty miles without a single house.

We followed one road
as long as I watched; it snaked
through desert, riverbeds, greenery
with equal stolidness. North,
twenty miles or so, a river. A cool
blue ribbon tossed into a sandbox.

As the river crooked, the plane slowed,
and I looked west to Arizona.
I expected it to be
as yellow as its puzzle piece.

​

​SPICE

​There are recipes, thousands of them
that make the rounds, church suppers,
fundraisers, celebrity chef cookbooks.
They command you—a quarter-teaspoon
of this, a tablespoon of that, a money-back
guarantee that your entree will please
the pickiest mother-in-law.

Any chef worth his nigella will tell you
this is ludicrous. Spice application
more resembles black magic than organic
chemistry. We measure in pinches,
tads, dribs and drabs, speak
of eyeballing it. Fenugreek and asafoetida
replace newt and frog, but the process
remains static. We run our fingers
through powdered gold, let it drift
down to the bubbles in the Dutch oven.
We offer words to the various deities
of hearth, fire animal, vegetable.
Hands weave in complex forms
with whisks, spoons, a ladle
to taste. And of course, like
any magic, we sit, ponder
the outcomes, read our fortunes
in haggis, tea leaves, salt.

I run my finger through the red
silky hair of your forearm, resist
the urge to bring it to my lips,
guess the arcane art that formed you.

TOURMALINE
​

She wonders 
why she can't laugh
at her situation
anymore

as the dog pisses
on the bedroom rug again
and the TV
is still on the blink
her boyfriend
just dumped her
and she had to take
a pay cut
or lose her job

maybe if she throws
the TV out the window
it'll land on her boyfriend's head

that makes her laugh

​