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Never Just a Game
she tells me as we sit at the table,
the board before us a map of choices,
a rack of identities to try on
and take off like a coat once loved,
now thread-bare, pockets loaded
with memories like stones.
Do we play against each other
or the game? Easy enough to place my pieces
wherever I want, sweep everything aside,
but desire is hottest when it’s thwarted
the tension building with each move weighed,
considered—the flirting comment,
the quick look down, a glancing touch
butterfly soft along the curve of back.
Almost the story of when we met,
the story we take with us like a scarf
through meetings with friends, colleagues,
the familiar piece we can display and say,
Why, this unlikely thing?
We’re trying out new paths
new ways to test and rest against the other,
to find this small success
or that as territories shift
and pieces web their way across the board.
We choose. And each choice tangles
with the others until we have a knot
that Heracles himself could not unknot.
Evening stretches out to turn on lights in other houses.
We fold the board and sort the pieces.
A story woven into larger story,
a scarf grown longer, brighter.
- James Engelhardt
James Engelhardt’s poems have appeared in the North American Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Sheila-Na-Gig, ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Qu Literary Magazine, Fourth River, and many others. His ecopoetry manifesto is “The Language Habitat,” and his book, Bone Willows, is available from Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press. He lives in the South Carolina Upstate and is a lecturer in the English Department at Furman University.