Kevin Prufer


National Anthem


At the very center of the swimming pool,
the drowned squirrel turned
        slowly in sunlight.

I could not reach it with the net.

Flies swirled over its back
like sparks.

+

I poured myself a drink
and listened to the water lap the concrete.

The plastic recliner hot and sticky
against my back.

The squirrel’s legs stiff.
Its face in the chlorine.

+

When we were kids, my friend Miles 
used to shoot squirrels out of the trees
with his .22—

They flopped into the grass.
Their tails twitched.

+

Tree rats, he called them.

I’d never even fired a gun.  

+

After a while, the squirrel tipped on its side,
but floated no closer to the edge.

Evening slid over the swimming pool 
like a blue silk sheet.

+

After he came back from the war, we laughed
and drank.
      He told me about sniping
fucking shadows.

+

You best watch yourself, he said then, 
picking up his .22.

Say what? 

He lowered the .22, smiling widely.

+

I’d had enough to drink.
I slipped into the pool and floated on my back.

The stars pinned the sky up.

+

The pool was like my country,
cool and pleasant on the skin.

The dead squirrel didn’t really bother me.


The Adulterer


Of that novel,
                        only one scene has stayed with me:

A man on a bridge holding two brown puppies 
which, one after the other,
                              he drops into the river  
far below.

The puppies paddle toward the shore.

Then the man
                       cocks his pistol, aims—

+

Red azaleas,
                    look at the azaleas!
my wife said,

but we had already driven past the park.

Still, I nodded.
They’re beautiful, I told her.

+

I was always thinking
of you
at red lights, rush hour, the long line of cars
idling
on hot pavement,

+

but that day I was thinking
      of puppies,

how the second one paddled toward the shore
while high above, on the bridge,
                          the men laughed.

+

We were going to a garden party
            where we would talk about movies
and maybe the opera.
Had you been there, 
I would try not to watch you
          swirl your glass
so the red wine rises almost to the lip,

+

blood in the water where the puppy
slipped past the mossy rocks,
                    then a dissipation of blood, pink,
then pale, then
almost as if 
there had been no blood,

+

which is how I wanted to end it—
Just a thinning of pain into the water—

+

The happy couples 
                               fingered the stemware,
their laughter
like the tinkling of broken glass
over rocks.

+

The man in the novel
leveled his pistol again.  

Oh, no you don’t, 
                  he said,

while the puppy 
scrambled toward the rocks. 


Occurrences


You still occur to me from time to time
the way an asteroid occurs 
to the surface of the moon.

When night comes,
the moon occurs to the sky,
but a chunk is missing.

The gap the asteroid left
was like the chip that occurred to your tooth,
hard not to look at in your perfect mouth.

But you are five years dead,
so only your memory can occur
to anyone. Not you. You

are beyond occurrence. You 
are circling the chipped moon,
or that’s how you occur to me, now.

I loved you once. Now, when I aim my telescope just right, 
you are a distant black speck 
traversing the moon’s bright disk.

 

Kevin Prufer's ninth book is The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023). His novel Sleepaway will appear in 2024 from Acre Books. He is Professor in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Houston and in the low-residency MFA at Lesley University. He also co-directs The Unsung Masters Series, a book series devoted to recovering the lives and work of great but little-known authors.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2023