The Fair
Dom Fonce
I have never become a town, though
the ghost-thought swimming in the streets
nips at my ears—never hammered
a city inside myself. As a child, I gathered
fairground buckeyes in my shirt,
like a drain hoarding marbles, and skipped
them off brick walls, morphing
tree orbs into moth wings
in my mind—to hope
something new would birth
from the debris below, to make
a collection multiply through explosion.
Yes, ants cluster around a molten dab of butter,
and will wage war to do so, but there is no
celebration in that. Here, we are crowds
smiling at crowds—occasionally wondering why
we are here and how respite zips at us
like flies. Perhaps wood and iron keeps
a soul sparked from a child’s first night being
one in thousands—seeing the adults
toddler-wobble in tow—and the quiet of empty
cornfields staring in from the outside.
Dom Fonce is a poet from Youngstown, Ohio. He is the author of Here, We Bury the Hearts (Finishing Line Press, 2019). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Volney Road Review. His poetry has been published in the Tishman Review, Obra/Artifact, Burning House Press, Black Rabbit Quarterly, Italian Americana, 3Elements Review, Junto Magazine, America’s Best Emerging Poets 2018: Midwest Region, and elsewhere.