Bluets
I dreamt I was a ghost and couldn’t feel any more pain and I watched your sister help you move out of a home I’d never lived in. You stepped through me and then stopped because you remembered something I once said and I looked at you and was afraid. Then it was snowing and I was angry because it was May but understood the Adirondacks always have the last laugh. And you kept moving furniture and slipped and the snowfall became heavier and I was worried about the bluets lying crushed beneath it all.
Chris says, it strikes me as impossible, the keys jammed into a body that seems curled by a strongman at the circus; an elephant ear dipped in brass. I always wondered how something so compressed could produce such beautiful sounds. And nobody questions you after they ask what you do for a living and you tell them the French horn.
In our dream band, on French horn:
Christopher Locke was born in New Hampshire and received his MFA from Goddard College. His poems have appeared in, among others, The North American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Poetry East, The Night Heron Barks, Southwest Review, The Sun, West Branch, Rattle, Rhino, The Adirondack Review, and NPR’s Morning Edition and Ireland’s Radio One. He won the 2018 Black River Chapbook Award (Black Lawrence Press—2020) for his collection of short stories 25 Trumbulls Road. His latest poetry collection, Music For Ghosts, (NYQ Books) and memoir Without Saints (Black Lawrence Press) are both forthcoming in 2022. 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.
John Frederick Kensett American
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 