Gospel
Andrew Alexander Mobbs
The brick steps on my mother's back porch stay warm well into the dark like oven burners
set to simmer then neglected. This summer is pure and proper: the watermelons are juicy,
the leaves curl into the heat. A few days ago, I drove to the cemetery on a whim to search
for my grandparents and finally found them on the edge where the grass met the asphalt:
suddenly, the history of this place unfolded like a patchwork quilt,
the kind once stretched across an old country bed where people bled
in the cloth.
Sometimes, I feel like the night before me is an enormous painting that I must interpret,
derivative of all previous nights until a new season is born. Sometimes, I think to myself
I don't want this anymore when I hear the metallic shriek of a lonely train. Sometimes,
I give my eyes to the absence of color, my ears to the chorus of tree frogs, my gospel.
Andrew Alexander Mobbs, Arkansas native and vagabond of the world, has been writing poetry for nearly a decade. In 2013, he released his debut poetry collection, Strangers and Pilgrims (Six Gallery Press), and his work has also appeared in Vortex Magazine, Deep South Magazine, New Plains Review, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Calliope, Zetetikon, Gravel Literary Journal, The Montucky Review, The Round, and After Happy Hour Review. He was a 2014 Pushcart Prize nominee, and he co-founded Nude Bruce Review, a nonprofit online literary magazine, in 2012.