In Time

Timothy Nolan

(a Golden Shovel after Gwendolyn Brooks’ Old Mary)

Passing participles lubricate my
losses, always: workin’ my last
gay nerve, playing zone defense

with a faerie-phrase on repeat. Is
a hiss a sound searching for the
flawless form, or a post-dated present

prowling for its future tense⸺
& what of it
if it sounds a little

weak & the vocal fry hurts
my fragile chords, it’s just me
out here in the now.

Why should it matter to
anyone not in the know
why I’m all treble, why I

dial down deep, shall
I aim for flawless but not
fey-sounding? Nah, I’ll just go

where there’s good cathedral-hunting,
pebbled beaches & bronzed bodies in
Speedo bikinis (someplace like Spain

where everyone speaks with a lisp) or
look to a Santa Fe sun cherrying
the late day sky to get me back in

synch; a plunge in an ice-cold Michigan
lake might do me some good, or
maybe I’ll just moose off to Maine.

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Timothy Nolan (he/him/his) is a writer and visual artist living in Palm Springs, California with his husband and their rescue dog, Scout. He has exhibited extensively for three decades and his work is in the collections of the DeYoung Museum of Art in San Francisco, and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. His poems appear in Puerto del Sol, Fourteen Hills, Unbroken, The Museum of Americana, Rough Cut Press, Rise Up Review, the Fifth Wheel Press anthology Flux, and Troublemaker Firestarter.