CHRISTIAN ANTON GERARD

There’s the Eleven-Thirty-Southbound,

a lightless star’s beam,
putting sound in the ground
you can hear with your feet,
but you’re thinking you’re hearing it
with your head. There’s a body
and its parts and there’s parts
somebody named body.
I don’t know if I’m in my gut or my sides,
my lungs or my thighs. Coin toss.
Trying to find me in me’s like
trying to point at a part of the dark
saying, There, that’s night, when
there’s a whole world of night 

around my finger’s end.
Only difference between
skin and not-skin’s
what’s named something else.
I can run all them boys
off the strip or they can run me,
but it ain’t a drag race unless there’s two
cars moving through air, against it. I give
myself to what moves faster than me
and in my slower-than-what’s-faster
I know what only the ground can say,
or air loud enough I can feel my insides.

Christian Anton Gerard’s a woodworker and the author of Holdfast (C&R Press, 2017) and Wilmot Here, Collect for Stella (WordTech, 2014). He's received Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarships and was a 2017 Best of the Netfinalist. Gerard is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Find him on the web at www.christianantongerard.com and https://www.facebook.com/PoetmadeWoodworksandBooks/