of no longer being
young arrives
in vivid dramas
of weedy greens
veining driveways
of rubble next door,
of milky divorced guys
with black beard
stubble needing me
to wrangle scuffed
armoires belonging
to spangly ex-wives
with eyelids
like painted peacocks
into truck beds
of rusty dings,
their scruffy disguises
as recognizable as
the combustible colors
drained from
slain butterfly wings:
shabby purple plaid
flannel shirts unbuttoned,
fuzzy guts, ragged
Jordans, silver
NBA shorts with
the snagged silky
fabric and shimmering
sag of souls,
tangled crowns
of dainty dreadlocks
above smeared eyeglasses
droopy on noses
for sober prescriptions
of watery blue
gazes. Being young
arrives then summers
no longer than
rented pleasures
in estranged exchanges,
than the gray
sting of juncos
buoyant on
the acrobatic ardor
of the air, the solitude
sustained in
metallic pings of
schoolyard flagpole
tethers stringing
strains of monotony
through crosswinds
swirling like
endlessly unfurling
plurals. The young
summers of no arrivals,
being longer,
see flamboyant
surges of mangled
red suns cooling
sooner to carved horns
of orange moons
angled in polished
mornings of ringing
violet, bring
incandescent murals
of muddy maroon
to the inner veils
of closed eyes—
like afternoon glare
passing through
bloody bubbles—
eyes opening only
to scan surroundings
for someone
to accept the unsanded
heavy ends
of our secondhand
damages, someone
to ignore
the splinter of surprise
jabbed in the fat
of our hands
that makes us
wince and squint
straight at knowing
the furnished burdens
we moved we will
soon move again.
Matthew James Babcock is the author of Four Tales of Troubled Love (fiction), Heterodoxologies (nonfiction), Points of Reference (poetry), Strange Terrain (poetry), Hidden Motion (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.
Rachael Bliss is a mixed-media artist based in Winston-Salem, N.C. Her work incorporates themes of larger ideas and meaning behind a painting, often using materials such as gouache paints, watercolor paints and others. Her art has been featured in several local competitions such as the Carolina Classic Fair, Scholastic art awards (Drowning in Thought winning the silver key), and her piece, The Two Sides, won the Congressional Art Contest for 2025 and is now hanging in the U.S Capital.
ELEVENTH HOUR LITERARY 