ZEUS

The TV blues my face.

I am watching the whole world unravel
for a hair-gelled man on TNT.

I am thinking about my garbage cans
that will never get dragged to the curb.

I am imagining the moon I’m missing.
It is, they say, one of those every nine-lifetime moons.

I am digging my thumb as deep as I can
into the volume button

so I don’t have to suffer
the neighborhood’s nightly language–

barks, whimpers, the howls that arch over town,

and Jesus, those collars
chained to the leaf-stripped maples,

to the shoulder sagging porches,
to lonely owners. I am remembering Zeus,

the pit bull, whose ribs fooled me for muscle.
His chain rooted in the concrete ground.

Zeus, lunging, gagging, twitching as if
God was indeed cruel

and had lit him on fire.
I’ll kill you Zeus would roar.

I am remembering shooting my basketball
with Zeus losing it in the lot behind me,

and bricking the ball against the rim
which hung slack-jawed over the garage door.

Give me two hundred years.
I’ll unlearn my life.

I will bask in the moon
with my neighbors.

Sam Bailey is from central Pennsylvania and is currently a PhD candidate in religion at Harvard University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Bear Review and elsewhere.