Excuses for Loneliness

Glances from no one as they pass,
bright screens blinking from on time to delayed—
what becomes of you? 
The children of strangers find 
each other in the terminal 
and learn one another’s names. 
Teenagers in corners sleep stubborn,  
elbows bent on backpacks. 
Adults shield their faces, like you,  
with the work they’ve barely chosen. 
You wouldn’t want to leave 
because who knows when 
the flights will resume their original plans?  
Can you imagine already flying? The flight 
attendants passing out pretzels and Coke 
in harmonious combination? The salt on your lips 
washed down by sweet gasoline. 
How smooth the whole ride will be. 
Yet here, you can wait with so much more: 
pretzels and Coke, sure, but also candy, beer, souvenirs, 
overpriced meals in faux fancy dens. So that the more  
can only mean less: the garish carnations 
adorning the already bustling display. 
The faces from childhood return— 
Chuck with the freckles and curly hair, the way 
Dylan smiled as he sang the nation’s song— 
though unclear, like a snow-stained window 
beyond which the moon lingers. 
No closer are you to leaving this terminal, 
which was designed for you to stay, 
waiting, knitting something maybe, 
while glancing occasionally outside at the silver egg 
pulled up to its fallopian bridge 
where it has been waiting for hours 
to shuttle you off somewhere more free. 

The Invention of Irony

When I first learned to spell it 
I couldn’t help but write my name everywhere. 
Caleb it would say in marker on my wrist, 
Caleb it would scream in green crayon 
on the dining room wallpaper flowers, 
Caleb no one would read 
etched into the wood of our bunkbed 
just behind my pillow.  
Like anyone young I wanted to be  
disseminated like a dollar bill, wanted 
a small trochaic sound to be my signal, 
wanted to be contained as a symbol like those faces  
on the TV, small and strange and the center  
of attention. My parents didn’t want this.  
No, son, don’t write your name there! 
Here, have some sheets of paper.   
It never was the same.  
At Sunday school soon after, 
I was told the story of Zachariah 
and still wanted, but wanted now 
to be silenced and for no one to see me. 
In Texas it was easy: the earth  
so hot and close you couldn’t joke about being 
but you could laugh inside your gut as Sarah did  
when she heard the Lord outside her tent 
giving news she thought might be true 
but couldn’t believe. Still, the laugh 
formed like a spiral of stars inside her, 
or a bacteria splotch on a clear petri dish, 
or the bend of a river groaning 
and aching at the edge between  
what was and wasn’t the river. I’d lie 
long afternoons like an iris on the black tarp 
of my childhood trampoline thinking 
of Isaac, whose name means him laughing,       
as the Dallas summer sun was swallowed  
into dark relief. Oh, how I want 
to go back into that deep, hot place 
and stop trembling in this sunless memory. 
I’m older now than my Mother and Father 
when they had their first daughter. 
I came in the middle, floating into the cresting mouth of a family. 
Caleb they named me. Like Isaac, a Hebrew name. 
Col meaning “whole” and Lev meaning “heart.”  
So that I can’t be spread apart, can’t be scattered  
like leaves over a river or the way memory stories us all 
in deposited fragments like silt gleaming across a wooden floor.  
See: here there is a mountain on the horizon.  
The Olympics over the water. 
I’m no longer a child. I’m not very old. I have left my home. 
I have carried my words like sticks for a sacrificial pyre 
and have laughed too often  
knowing I would place in the mouth  
of that fire  
some more reasonable sacrifice instead.  

CALEB BRAUN

Caleb Braun is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Texas Tech University. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award from the University of Washington and his poems have appeared in Harpur Palate, Arcturus, The Boiler, and Gulf Stream Literary Magazine.