We Love Throwback Thursday
Because we get to believe history
is behind us, time is nothing
but a picture in a drawer
we can post on a wall and laugh at
with our friends. The hair cuts
and the cutoffs, braces and prom night
breakups. Let’s pretend history doesn’t hang
on our bodies like the black blood
and spear points and horse shit
and human shit on Hector’s corpse.
Of course they burned the body,
but we can’t burn our body
of work; our history’s here: the scars
that meet us in the shower, our hairline,
credit line, line we won’t cross
to touch a warm chest in the morning.
Lines move, but time doesn’t
work in lines, doesn’t work
like the interstate: exits passed
and forgotten, rest stops marked
miles beforehand. We draw time
machines in the margins
not because the past is out of our grasp
or because the future is a Sphinxian riddle.
We wish it took black magic
or a black hole to touch yesterday.
We wish most tomorrows weren’t
predictable as the sun.
Jason McCall
Jason McCall is the author of Dear Hero, (winner of the 2012 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize) Silver (Main Street Rag), I Can Explain (Finishing Line Press), and forthcoming Mother, Less Child (winner of the 2013 Paper Nautilus Vella Chapbook Prize). He is from the great state of Alabama, where he currently teaches at the University of Alabama. He holds an MFA from the University of Miami, and his work has been featured in Cimarron Review, The Los Angeles Review, New Letters, The Rumpus, and other journals.