Christopher Childers

Two poems from Christopher Childers’s Bitters

followed by a note on the author

Miasma

The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.
I hide. I wait. I write polemic prose.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

I avoid strangers, do as I was taught.
The wifi’s buffering. The laptop froze.
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

It’s in a cough, a tasteless patch, a clot,
or nothing, or a swelling of the toes.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

Airplanes are grounded, slots untouched. The hot
dates, the booze, the savings—it all goes.
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

My lying foes expose the lies I’ve bought.
Liars! I hope they end up comatose.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?

Refrigerators sputter. Bodies rot.
We slump at screens. Joints harden in the pose.
The plague’s a lot more boring than we thought.

The things I used to live for, I do not.
Abstraction breeds inside me. Feeling slows.
Who knows what someone has or hasn’t got?
The plague’s a lot more boring than I thought.

 

Christopher Childers

 

On the Rocks

All he had ever tried was to find balance,
the kind that comes of reading and riding water.
Hence the gin. The marriage was the ballast.
But the nature of a river is to wander,
unsheathing boulders hidden in their billions
as waters fall and currents turn toward winter.
Another drink. Preservers become burdens
so suddenly, and float off in the welter.

Enough of that. Tomorrow is for crafting
a raft out of the wreckage, lashed with failures.
He’ll start at dawn, when it breaks bright and ashen.
Tonight he’s on the river, drifting, drifting,
nudged by a thousand hands as soft as flowers
into the headwinds rising off the ocean.

 

Christopher Childers

 

Miasma first appeared in Smartish Pace, and is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2023; On the Rocks first appeared in 32 Poems.

Christopher Childers is the author of The Penguin Book of Greek and Latin Lyric Verse (published March 2024), a book over a decade in the making. He received an NEA Translators’ Fellowship in 2018, and his work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, the Yale Review, Agni, Literary Matters, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. He has an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He currently lives in Baltimore and teaches Latin at the Gilman School but will be heading to Los Angeles in 2024.