Jonathan Travelstead
Jonathan Travelstead served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. Having finished his MFA at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale, he now works on an old dirt-bike he hopes will one day get him to the salt flats of Bolivia. He has published work in The Iowa Review and on Poetrydaily.com among others, and his first collection “How We Bury Our Dead” by Cobalt/Thumbnail Press was released in March, 2015.
Links to Mr. Travelstead's book and author page.
http://www.cobaltreview.com/product/how-we-bury-our-dead-paperback/
https://www.facebook.com/writerjonathantravelstead?ref=hl
Turtles
The reenactment of an old joke fills in my mind as I listen:
A physics professor guest lectures in a University convention room
on cosmic scale, and perspective. It’s hard at first, believing
a man who talks in maths, says each atom is a Micro Machine Earth,
complete with its electrons in orbit. But it’s hard believing
what I can’t see from a man who says Milky Ways
and Ursa Majors stack like Dixie cups in a heap with no end in sight.
This hard believing is as far as I get when the professor
loses his audience to a bubbly freshman in a pink hoodie
who's come for extra credit and who, on a dare, stands and says
So what you’re saying is it’s turtles all the way down? When the laughter
dies down what I’m left with is the weight of tangible belief
haunting me beyond the lecture. The anecdote as tool for unlocking
what isn’t well understood assumes we accept that when a hand
clasping a knob turns- though the eye is veiled from the tumblers
clicking into place, the jamb unbolts and a door
is opened. Sometimes a joke is only a joke, and sometimes
bubble gum can plug a leaking fuel tank. The sentiment
follows me down Sunset Drive as my beagle trots me down
Tower Road, and Skyline. What I cannot touch pursues
with the ticking of her toenails at each curb, the tympani a reminder
it’s time to clip them, but also that she is four dog-lengths ahead
rooting at fleas hitching rides on her back like drunk hobos
from the field’s uncut timothy. Like that you are lost
at what rung of the microcosm you’re barely making three points
of contact with, or which way you’d gone in this neighborhood
where the roofs of Spanish tile look so alien, the lamp lights dim
in the windows through the fog. This, the heroic dose of scale
on which you trip: Is it I treading the shell of an ancient turtle
and does my back labor some smaller beings
in a stack of Dixie cups? Having heard Horton, who now hears me?
I trust her nose for finding home in this same hard believing
which accepts every cinder my boot scatters to the street
is its own dirty Sputnik straining to break orbit. Blinking,
all the stars have drugged and captured their own moons
like bumblebees tethered each by a string of floss,
trawling around them, yellow-black. Nothing else to do
but be led home, blind, by the light only my friend’s nose sees,
and again I disappear, insignificant, knowing only that believing
is a wrestling match between what is seen and what is less
understood. Sometimes we get the window seat,
sometimes we're the train.
The Department of State’s Rhetoric
is simple, but effective. Sponsors Disney World, not El Salvador.
In a sentence the language both giveths and takeths away,
leaves fear like an empty pocket for stuffing instead with dollars.
Their web page and the Amish community both admonish
travel abroad when their children flee. Leave your homes and you may
never return! In my hometown I finger the blinds open,
see an officer hit a parked car, then police my neighborhood
for flagrant use of head-strapped recorders. So many tools of persuasion.
Imagine McCarthy’s finger-waggling ghost, fear’s spectre
sermonizing against the original lyrics to “This Land is Your Land”
in ye olde language: Be-YOND is a glen, and IN that glen is a SIGN,
a SIGN which reads 'Private Property’ and so on with cocksblood,
democrats, and afro-coiffed Barbies. Where tone’s volume
and variance fails, only combine the precious with something strange,
then watch Americans shutter their windows against grotesquerie
of all colors, bury Ball jars in the basement’s dirt floor
as quadcopter blades are heard flogging the sky. That cherubic
susurration of conscience flitting just beyond your right shoulder?
‘Tis only a winged St. Visa masturbating to the countdown
of a decreasing grace period, a pundit’s stilted language behind which
he hides from a darling he never had to kill learning to believe.
Guns, bibles, and peanut butter fly from shelves as if hooked
with spinner-bait. It goes unreported that two million sharks yearly
slaughter millions more krill and skipjack, but everyone
got the news since no one goes out anymore. Even W,
days after the twin towers curtsied, told us Get down to Disney World
in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life,
the way we want it to be enjoyed.
Links to Mr. Travelstead's book and author page.
http://www.cobaltreview.com/product/how-we-bury-our-dead-paperback/
https://www.facebook.com/writerjonathantravelstead?ref=hl
Turtles
The reenactment of an old joke fills in my mind as I listen:
A physics professor guest lectures in a University convention room
on cosmic scale, and perspective. It’s hard at first, believing
a man who talks in maths, says each atom is a Micro Machine Earth,
complete with its electrons in orbit. But it’s hard believing
what I can’t see from a man who says Milky Ways
and Ursa Majors stack like Dixie cups in a heap with no end in sight.
This hard believing is as far as I get when the professor
loses his audience to a bubbly freshman in a pink hoodie
who's come for extra credit and who, on a dare, stands and says
So what you’re saying is it’s turtles all the way down? When the laughter
dies down what I’m left with is the weight of tangible belief
haunting me beyond the lecture. The anecdote as tool for unlocking
what isn’t well understood assumes we accept that when a hand
clasping a knob turns- though the eye is veiled from the tumblers
clicking into place, the jamb unbolts and a door
is opened. Sometimes a joke is only a joke, and sometimes
bubble gum can plug a leaking fuel tank. The sentiment
follows me down Sunset Drive as my beagle trots me down
Tower Road, and Skyline. What I cannot touch pursues
with the ticking of her toenails at each curb, the tympani a reminder
it’s time to clip them, but also that she is four dog-lengths ahead
rooting at fleas hitching rides on her back like drunk hobos
from the field’s uncut timothy. Like that you are lost
at what rung of the microcosm you’re barely making three points
of contact with, or which way you’d gone in this neighborhood
where the roofs of Spanish tile look so alien, the lamp lights dim
in the windows through the fog. This, the heroic dose of scale
on which you trip: Is it I treading the shell of an ancient turtle
and does my back labor some smaller beings
in a stack of Dixie cups? Having heard Horton, who now hears me?
I trust her nose for finding home in this same hard believing
which accepts every cinder my boot scatters to the street
is its own dirty Sputnik straining to break orbit. Blinking,
all the stars have drugged and captured their own moons
like bumblebees tethered each by a string of floss,
trawling around them, yellow-black. Nothing else to do
but be led home, blind, by the light only my friend’s nose sees,
and again I disappear, insignificant, knowing only that believing
is a wrestling match between what is seen and what is less
understood. Sometimes we get the window seat,
sometimes we're the train.
The Department of State’s Rhetoric
is simple, but effective. Sponsors Disney World, not El Salvador.
In a sentence the language both giveths and takeths away,
leaves fear like an empty pocket for stuffing instead with dollars.
Their web page and the Amish community both admonish
travel abroad when their children flee. Leave your homes and you may
never return! In my hometown I finger the blinds open,
see an officer hit a parked car, then police my neighborhood
for flagrant use of head-strapped recorders. So many tools of persuasion.
Imagine McCarthy’s finger-waggling ghost, fear’s spectre
sermonizing against the original lyrics to “This Land is Your Land”
in ye olde language: Be-YOND is a glen, and IN that glen is a SIGN,
a SIGN which reads 'Private Property’ and so on with cocksblood,
democrats, and afro-coiffed Barbies. Where tone’s volume
and variance fails, only combine the precious with something strange,
then watch Americans shutter their windows against grotesquerie
of all colors, bury Ball jars in the basement’s dirt floor
as quadcopter blades are heard flogging the sky. That cherubic
susurration of conscience flitting just beyond your right shoulder?
‘Tis only a winged St. Visa masturbating to the countdown
of a decreasing grace period, a pundit’s stilted language behind which
he hides from a darling he never had to kill learning to believe.
Guns, bibles, and peanut butter fly from shelves as if hooked
with spinner-bait. It goes unreported that two million sharks yearly
slaughter millions more krill and skipjack, but everyone
got the news since no one goes out anymore. Even W,
days after the twin towers curtsied, told us Get down to Disney World
in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life,
the way we want it to be enjoyed.
