CHRISTOPHER LOCKE’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in such magazines as The North American Review, Poets & Writers, The Rumpus, Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, Verse Daily, Southwest Review, Slice, The Literary Review, The Sun, West Branch, Rattle, 32 Poems, Saranac Review, Whiskey Island, and NPR's Morning Edition and Ireland’s Radio One. His latest book of poems and travel writing is Ordinary Gods, (Salmon Poetry—2017) and he won the Black River Chapbook Award (Black Lawrence Press—2020) for his collection of short stories, 25 Trumbulls Road. Locke received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, and state grants in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. He has been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize many times. Chris lives in the Adirondacks where he teaches English at North Country Community College.
Targets
He lifts his cellphone higher and waves
like Prospero assembling the clouds—
still no reception. Even here, a rest stop
glutted in New Jersey accents and head
lights dreaming every deer extinct. Others
simply leave: a van costumed in boys
ready for soccer or some other bloodless
parade; big rigs souped up on grit and
a week’s worth of amphetamines. All
merge, untethering like fevered pearls
into a parkway tiled by lights creeping
north. But he has bigger fish to fry,
regrets leaving this morning before
she could decide; her shower hissed
behind the door as he pressed his ear
jealous for answers. So now he stretches
on his toes wishing he chose a different
carrier, that commercial with the salesgirl
both beautiful and vacant, like how he
feels right now, minus the beautiful
part. And as he waves again, halfway
frenetic, a stranger next to a Coke machine,
a man also wounded by the curse of dumb
choices, waves back, unsure, thinking
maybe it’s that boy he couldn’t love all
those years ago. And when he feels
something catch in his throat he waves
bigger, convinced, and that’s when he
sees the phone, hears it ring as the man
pulls it to his mouth repeating a girl’s name.
The stranger unsmiles and turns back toward
the lot. He worries he forgot to lock his car:
another easy target. And all the heartbreak after.
— Christopher Locke
Repentance
Splayed across cement like a grim
Jesus, he bled through a hospital
gown too short to find his knees.
A woman held his face, crying
for God while two cops hovered
instead. You couldn’t take any
of it and muscled to the escalator
with its slow baptism of light, exhaust
dying from your hair until a sudden
punch of street-wind as someone
laughed, clearly in love, cab door
shutting behind. The traffic pressed
tight as hands in supplication; those
days of your childhood when you believed
prayer could save anyone, even you.
— Christopher Locke