Chuck Salmons
Chuck Salmons is a poet and has served as part of the leadership for the Ohio Poetry Association for more than a decade. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review, Pudding Magazine, The Fib Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has published three poetry collections: Stargazer Suite (11thour Press, 2016), Patch Job (NightBallet Press, 2017), and The Grace of Gazing Inward: Poems in Response to the Art of Alice Carpenter (Dos Madres Press, 2024). Chuck is a recipient of a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for poetry, and he performs with the poetry trio Concrete Wink. chucksalmons.com
Poem for the New School Year
“Russia Strikes Playground in Kyiv After Blaming Ukraine for Crimea Bridge Attack”
– Headline from Vice.com, October 10, 2022
Overhead, against the blue scalp of October sky,
two olive drab Hueys rumble aloft
loaded with Army reservists on a training flight.
Meanwhile, on the Liberty Elementary playground,
a jungle gym bounces with boys maneuvering
the monkey bars. Too big for the apparatus,
they bend their legs at the knees to avoid dragging
their feet in the mulch bed below. They swing,
stuttering bar to bar, wing spans too great
for such small gaps between grips.
Who would tell them they are far too old
for this play? Who would push them so quickly
into manhood, those long years burdened
by more questions than answers. Even now,
when their flesh has begun to sweat and stink,
their desires checked only by body-to-body
collisions on basketball courts or football fields,
they find simple joy in the sway of long legs
above the ground, like soldiers in those choppers
expecting nothing but a soft landing.
At the Bottom of the Exit Ramp
The bearded man summons another
morning of strength to smile and wave,
hefts a ragged cardboard remnant,
spelled out in black marker the plight
of himself and his partner, the woman
sitting hoodie up beneath the pole light.
Rancid as a dirty armpit, stuck as a rusted zipper,
he has no time for candor, no patience
for the pinecone crumble of asphalt alleys
litter strewn with broken bottles, yogurt cups,
the occasional needle—so he has pitched their tent
here near a bustling exit. His mission: expediency,
hastened by the ever-changing traffic signal.
His goal: another day of handouts—
bottled water, a few bucks to buy a sandwich,
another blanket to keep them warm
beneath January’s lazy eye moon.
I offer an apple and orange to nourish them
and the life stirring inside her,
to usher them closer to spring, its hyacinths
carpeting the exit in gold and green
and above their tent, a river birch
weeping, branches bursting with catkins,
about to cast its seed to the wind.
