Jake Bauer
Greg Grummer Poetry Contest Winner 2020
I’d been all morning
trying to fix this
damn thing. I was aiming
to finally nail down
the symbolic.
The field by the airport
walked right into me.
Someone was supposed
to mind the landscaping,
but now it’s just all
overgrown in my gut.
Sometimes Meryl says
I need to shut off
the machine I use
for generating lies. Meryl
has these nice fingerprints
that remind me of ten
penguins in a desert.
But there really is
a certain kind of eyehook
you can use to attach
paradise to any working
memory. If my mother
who is made of rain
ever phones me again
I’ll head straight
out this window
and stand in the air.
Jake Bauer
is the marketing director for Saturnalia Books. He is also co-author of Idaho Falls (SurVision Books, 2019). His poems have recently appeared in Threepenny Review, Thrush, Third Coast, and Poetry Northwest, among others.
Art
“Last Known Address” K. Carlton Johnson, phoebe 49.2