Tom C. Hunley

Tom C. Hunley has published poems in journals with names beginning with every letter of the alphabet, including Slippery Elm, Smartish Pace, Snake Nation Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Indiana Review, Southern Poetry Review, Southern Review of Books, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Spillway, Split Lip Magazine, Spring: The Journal of the EE Cummings Society, and StorySouth.

Upon First Reading Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

The linings of my veins
ached in the middle
of a warfare of noises.
What was going to happen
rained down on my head.
I hadn’t wanted to find the man
hanging what he was dreaming
so that the air pulsed with color.
I was going home from
some basic misunderstanding.
Like a foreigner breathing,
seeds were moaning in the gardens.

I was so flooded with yearning
a spasm ran through me.
Light streaks striped Tom’s face.
I was out of luck, a china cup
in millions of bits, but happy
like a machine that polishes stones.
The sky didn’t have any air in it.
The earth was made of shadows.

And the Savior did come, but
right now he is, I think, in the state
prison in Colorado. Like the dead
coming back, a mist covered everything.
I felt the beauty, a deep thirst being quenched.
That world! These days it’s all brainless
angels bruised the colors of a tattoo.
Sunset danced on my despair.
The torn moon mended.

I was in love, enough to drink
for two hours. I staggered, clinging
to a book. Most days are crushed
breathless by something far away,
too beautiful, true in a fiery
and glorious way. I was born
in a story, word for word,
alive in a deeper sense,
coming back over and over.
Look in the mirror. Hah!
Wrecked cars. My bullet hole.

Nothing could stifle the blurry music
of rush hour absorbing the sounds of my steps
full of smoke and silences I didn’t want to hear.
My guts jumping with unintelligible words,
I heard lovely cries, music, messages.
I heard the world smolder
around its edges for people like us.