David Beebe

Dear Sister


Sometimes I drive past the blue house
with its ashen roof and white trim, note
the collected changes of a decade –
gone the bushes at the end of the cracked
driveway, gone the redbud popcorn bloom of spring.
There’s a small garden in the backyard
where the above ground pool used to bring
the family together, and the wide oak, sick
with canker and BB pellets, no longer leans
heavy into the porch, lending shade to those
unforgiving summer evenings.

I see you, bouncing room to room as if we
were too poor for doors, your hair electrocuted,
the bottom of my outstretched t-shirt scraping
the carpet. I see the home movies where you
played all the parts. I see our first dog, scarred
by coyotes – still her tail thumps the floor.

The old neighborhood is a horseshoe in
the wandering lens of a cold satellite,
a postcard with a watermark so fine
you don’t have to hold it to the light.

The door is locked, but all our ghosts still haunt inside.

David Beebe

El Jardinero


He kneels closer to his work, ninety-two in the shade,
cigarette dangling from his mouth as smoke mixes into
his stringy, black hair with a little gray like the weathered
back of a cattle dog. Ash drops onto the ovate hosta leaf
and he brushes it away with his thumb. The air, thick as
bathwater, chases the last of the bruised rainclouds that
had briefly paused his work, beads of moisture ornamental
on the lenses of his glasses. He reaches his hands into
wet earth and pulls toward his body like a lucky hand of poker.
He digs and digs and I know his mind is elsewhere.
He stops and looks at the hole, there on his knees.
He returns the dirt inside and lays the base of a new gardenia
bush and I wonder where he had gone the moment before.

David Beebe

Caught Looking


Beneath Broken Arrow power lines,
Drummond Island in damp knee high grass,
Croton and Henning Park, warmed in last
light; the ball turns purplish orange with
short tosses upward before landing in soft
leather, like the fitted glide of putting on
Sunday shoes. I love the motion, the rhythm,
the movement of the seams – spinning, floating,
dancing, guided by higher, misunderstood things.
Deer watch from the edge of left field as coyotes
canter in right, in royal view of the town water
tower across the river, last in feeling the sun,
framed in center. Practicing our knuckles and
curves like boys who never wandered into the
woods, never stared down wolves in new darkness.

Originally appeared in The Tulsa Voice: October 2017.

Link to poem

David Beebe

Daylight savings time


I fell from the treehouse
as the adults talked in the kitchen.
I stared up at the tree that betrayed me,
past the leaves and branches at the moon
in early evening, nestled close like a piece
of fruit, wondering if the tree would let
the moon tumble too.

Sitting here now I smell sweet redbud
on the tail end of a western prairie fire,
rows of Bradford pear looking like winter
now more than three months ago. A county
burn ban keeps us from collecting kindling
and raking sanguine coals, over and over again.

A mourning dove rests at the edge
of the roof as I start to shiver in the shade –
the shadow swallowing the new grass of the
courtyard. Her song asks for warmer days
and spring showers and I tell her the rain
will keep coming till the rain gets it right.

David Beebe

Cherokee Skies


This weather confuses the birds, I’m told.
Seventy-three degrees in January on a Thursday afternoon.
The trees talk of former windfalls, widow makers,
cradled for baptisms under Cherokee skies – bark stripped
white like antlers tangled in black hickory, dried
leaves the rustle of balled paper.

Winter is barely out the gate
but spring chews in our ear.

The trees talk and I listen.

David Beebe

Apocalypse #2


This bar is lit year-round with Christmas lights
reflecting off the varnished oak, drinking glasses,
and liquor stock, and a dozen little tiki lamps
sporadically glow from their stationed posts;
an aura not unlike votive candles flickering
at the feet of the Blessed Virgin.

I’m redefining what it means to sit here
in the dark. It’s a shame they won’t be
talking about this in the next century:
the way he pronounced vacuous when
asked to describe the room, or the shot-glass
clank tuned in perfect collective pitch.
It’ll either be too hot or too cold by then,
and reading will be as ancient as laugh tracks
and patriotic cowboys, Monument Valley
now a beatific dementia that rises with
Abbadon and sets with Big Sur.

But I’m not thinking about that right now.
I’m thinking about you, whoever you are,
wrapped carelessly in a coral, melon-white
Mexican blanket on Zuma Beach with your
back to me, and whether or not it’s really been
ten years since I’ve seen the ocean.

Originally published in Sugar House Review: Fall/Winter 2018

David Beebe

After Hours


Smoke tangles with tangerine clouds on the horizon
like an invitation sealed in a soft cream envelope.
The dying breath of day sends an empty beer can down
the street into fresh dark, where no doubt it’ll go on forever.
One by one neighbors shut their windows but still
the laugh tracks bounce off brick and concrete, knowing
good and well this life is syndicated.

Next door two boys punch it out in the mosquito glow
of the streetlamp – shirts ripped, cursing like their fathers,
the neighborhood in silence as this happens all too often.
The world just isn’t big enough for boys with two first names.
You would’ve pulled them apart.

Last night I saw you in Cape Canaveral as rockets became
raptured in ribbons of smoke and you tossed your hair over
your shoulder and waved at the camera, laughing with all
your body the way honest people do. Before the end you said
without Him you were nothing, but even in nothing you were everything.

Often I awake in the dark unsure of where I am,
too afraid to move for there are killers on the highway,
haunted by white noise from an after-hours television.
Maybe it’s applause.

Originally appeared in Art Focus Oklahoma: Spring 2018.

Link to digital issue

David Beebe

Medicine woman later


It is hard not to picture their bodies,
stark in the contrast of new snow, lying
in the frigid shallow waters, their backs
to the sky in a final act of defiance –
her husband Black Kettle’s final words
heard only by yellow goldfinches,
preserved like Cheyenne arrowheads
hidden deep in pages of red earth, the
river playing with her long black hair like
bay grass in zephyr, her nine scars a
handwoven map leading back to Sand Creek.

David Beebe

Fort Gibson


Leaving the marina, the blue heron stands
at the rock island tip and stretches toward blue
sky, focused on the water’s surface and what might
exist beneath, like a patron saint of silverfish or
shipwrecks. Its wings unfold and shade the water and
as we pass I wonder whether to pray to the bird or
bribe with bluegill. I lay back under the blazing sun and
cross my arms, hand feed cigarette butts to dented beer cans,
wave at passing boats like I’m running for office.
Anchored near shore we unload the boat
for lunch in the shade of a thinning dogwood,
intoxicated off one another, or sunstroke.
Deer tracks map between trees and naked roots
before they disappear further inland.
She laughs at something I said and for a moment I imagine
the gentle algorithm it would take to hold her hand.
Barefoot on the rocks, it’s hard not to
believe all this was made for you and me.
Later in the middle of the lake the boys bob like buoys
as the girls pull at their swimsuits, connect thread to tanline
with white and pink borders like European boundaries;
parts of the world I’ll never see. I watch the shoreline
for another heron, the patron saint
of wardrobe malfunctions.

Originally appeared in The 3288 Review: Winter 2017.