they said expect numbness and i thought it’d feel like being drunk instead it felt the other way—precarious as the waltz of sobriety not like driving the street where your old house was rather walking through woods where no home will ever be sometimes it’s the key cut for a lock you can’t remember sometimes it’s the old claw-hammer held together by tape most nights it’s a three-legged dog running home through the rain and here you thought you could name this
i get lost sometimes in your metaphors what do a shepherd and a king have in common other than you always come out large and i always come out small this offends some but not me i was born in a small place i grew up among small people i have desires so small no one else can see them here is one that only the holy ghost knows when i was a child there was a field behind my house nights i would stand in it and throw rocks at the moon i had asked my mother where god lives she had said up there and pointed to the sky which meant the sky was just a window between his house and mine and to get him to come outside someone had to break the darkened glass everything but also nothing has changed since then i went by that field the other day the creek was dried up and the house was gone little piles of rocks still covered the ground like old abandoned fires
Daniel Leach has published poetry and fiction with Copper Nickel, The Greensboro Review, and storySouth. He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College. He lives in the low country of South Carolina with his wife and four kids.
This series of photographs is from Physical Training for Business Men by American author Harrie Irving Hancock. The 1919 book’s premise is that a certain quality of physical presence, “impressive carriage and appearance”, are essential to “those who would succeed in the business world”. The photos were taken by a “Mr Phelan” (who worked with Hancock on a number of other exercise books); the models are unnamed. (Abridged from The Public Domain Review.)
