HINTERLAND

By Kurt Rasmussen

The muddy lake is like an ocean to the boy
who is your son, digging landscapes in the sand.
He is a wastrel god with tiny, pruned-up hands
creating worlds and wrecking them with savage joy.
You are crumpled as those cans around your feet
as you watch him from your lawn chair while he plays.
Truth is, your heart is also made of sand today,
drying stone-like in the Oklahoma heat.
Driving home, you think to check him in the rearview.
He is blessedly silent, nodding toward sleep,
his questions left drifting in the lake behind you,
mouthed by carp along the bottom, a boy-length deep.
You think about the coming night, and of your bed:
vaster than the sea, stiller than the dead.

Images/Kurt Rasmussen

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Kurt Rasmussen lives and writes in Las Vegas where he is an active member of both the recovery and poetry communities. He has published poems in Chariton Review, Tishman Review, and other respected journals and has a book out (YES: Poems).

Kurt Rasmussen also participated in Poetry Matters! (a Special Initiative of Nevada Humanities) in June 2020. Listen in as Kurt reads from his book of poems, YES. 

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