I finish a last double-expresso at our kitchen table,
rehash ad infinitum my via Dolorosa.
We must depend on agreed promises,
those begun as felicity, ending in fallacy.
The clock glowers with my third shift ache
between going and gone. Your tiny fingers
linger on my wrist. You tolerate allowances
to love as I shoo your hands like broken wings
attempting escape. Silence, for now, links us.
For you, devotion proves no more than
a silly reparation between the repeated
and the wrecked.
Our life flickers
like a silent film framed in rickety shudder—
pliable and wobbly we sift starlight for assurance.
I mumble prayers which rely on clichéd balance
between cupid's arrow and a dormant thorn.
Your sadness on my departure dangles perfectly
like the emerald earrings I gave you.
I already long to rehear each sunrise.
My snowplowed passage glares.
Eerie streetlights refract on my icy windshield.
Gray slush adorns uncollected trash bags.
Empty boughs stare, a knot hole my only focus.
Third Shift Concessions by Sam Barbee | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser Set
Sam Barbee’s newest collection is titled Apertures of Voluptuous Force (2022, Redhawk Publishing). He has three previous poetry collections, including That Rain We Needed (2016, Press 53), a nominee for the Roanoke-Chowan Award as one of North Carolina’s best poetry collections of 2016. Also, Uncommon Book of Prayer (2021, Main Street Rag) chronicling family travels throughout England.
His poems currently appear in Cave Wall, Asheville Poetry Review’s 30 Year Anthology, and The Anthology of Appalachian Writers (WV), among others; plus on-line journals Dead Mule School of Literature, American Diversity Report, Grand Little Things, Verse-Virtual, and Medusa’s Kitchen. He is a two-time Pushcart Nominee.
He served as President of the Winston-Salem Writers, and also NC Poetry Society, and is one of the originators of the Poetry In Plain Sight — now in its fourteenth year — a poetry initiative to feature NC poets on broadside posters and display them in NC towns statewide.
