JOCKEY

Please dare the bell strike.

The leaps it will take for so little—like a crack in a church door

or some silly ideas from within.

As if Buster Keaton’s answer to the calling of a girl
were a manifestation of ricochets:

himself, himself, and himself, in his full Sunday best, sprinting like a bird flies.

It is not love we’ve fallen into, it’s something else.

What was it that we knew,
passing each other like the shine at night of the trolley lamp

bouncing off the rails, which we cannot see,
then off the cable track above us,

which we can?

A church door is only every door

breaking an afternoon
open—mayflies wash in the air the devastating sun,

the blue sky ever-smell kicking in the mouth,
the it keeping what it can of what’s too soon.

Noa Saunders is a PhD Candidate at Boston University, where she teaches classes on poetry, film, and writing. She received her MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park. Recent poems and reviews can be found in Ninth Letter, The Shore, Against the Current, and The Bitchin' Kitsch.