Praise Be
to town founders
with small imaginations,
to three-day weekend
scenes that neither
deceive nor redeem
in Lava Hot Springs
(incorporated nineteen hundred
fifteen). To the brash
northwestern winter
we escape through
a federal holiday, to restless
passage, to racing
weightless age down
state highways as bright
as the birthday
of Doctor King Junior,
praise be. Rejoice in
rusty sun rebounding
from red shed roofs.
Applaud the rawboned
raunch of all jerkwater
resorts. Exult in
the liquid tumult of
snow melt trickling
gritty signatures down
outdated cowpoke alleyways
shorter than the national
memory. A brittle blond
woman lunching in
78 Main Street Eatery
exercises her civil right
to blubber in public
to her bearded husband,
hunched over her turkey club,
dusty bottled liquors,
bruised burgundy and sugary
gold, racking chances
over her head like
a shooting gallery of sorrow.
Itchy red skin rims
the coffin lid eye slits
of the frowzy teen
manning the sweet shoppe
counter, black fingernail
polish curling like
a curse around the faded
waffle cone of Circus Confetti
ice cream he hands
a sobbing child. Raise praise?
Or erase our sleepy
scapegrace ways of phasing
past racism into
a season pass of days off
to loaf outdoors
in communal mineral pools?
Who reclaims the remains
of today? This glossy
taxonomy of bodies:
bulbous butts, bland stares,
sleek white thighs
razored to a laser sheen,
fuzzy truckers with
beach ball bellies in sodden
orange jammers and
smudged caps, the bulky
redhead in droopy
russet bikini, her sprawling
tattoo of thorny demons
mapped like a tawdry
country across the freckled
paunch of her back.
Our surroundings, on
departure, a testament
to sharp textures:
boxcars coiling a tarnished
cargo of dark yellow
and ferrous steel around
rocky peaks of icy sagebrush,
oval stones robed in lobes
of snow in chilly creeks,
a blue overdose of sky
that launches your heart
from your mouth.
How we enter and leave
this venting planet
of boozy sulfurous fumes,
peering at others
for a clearer view through
rising veils of steamy plumes:
For now, soaking
shoulder-to-shoulder
like crowds of drowsy macaques
in the hot reservoirs
of ourselves, always near
boiling, only nearly naked,
only half-submerged
in the troubled transparencies
of our surface history,
easing in, testing
our tolerance for the temperature.
Once in, thinking how
to get out, more woozy
and wobbly than planned.
Once out, if we can
trust ourselves to stand.
— Matthew James Babcock
Matthew James Babcock is the author of Four Tales of Troubled Love (fiction), Heterodoxologies (nonfiction), Points of Reference (poetry), Strange Terrain (poetry), and Private Fire: The Ecopoetry and Prose of Robert Francis (criticism). His awards include the Juxtaprose Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Award, the AML Poetry Award, the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Short Fiction, and Winner of Press 53’s Open Awards Anthology Prize for his novella, “He Wanted to be a Cartoonist for The New Yorker.” In 2022, he was Arthur Dolsen Visiting Writer at Idaho State University. He lives with his family in Rexburg.
