Anniversary Premonition

By Trent Nutting / Issue 6

What the young will remember, huddled

like toadstools in this leaning grove of adults,

is the great uncle’s whistled s, his mouth

translated to flute and eyes rheumy

with the overflowing tears of the old.

They will listen to herky-jerk stories,

and some will see the couple squeeze

one hand into the other’s. They will stun

to hear that their grandfather—now frail

in his sweater and jut of knee-bones,

like washing laid over a wooden chair—

once scaled a bridge to paint his name

and hers above a spring-swollen river.

They will marvel at his brashness

and romance. He will nod, and remember

how pocked and cold the bridge’s concrete was,

like the flank of some dead beast, and how

he clutched in his teeth the hard resin

handle of the paintbrush while he climbed,

its wet bristles fisted with deep red and

dripping like the bleeding heart of his youth.

Trent Nutting is a poet and teacher living in Connecticut. His work recently won the Connecticut River Review Poetry Contest. Other poems have been finalists in the Southeast Review Poetry Competition, the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize Competition, and University of Connecticut’s Wallace Stevens Poetry Prize. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Linebreak, Southeast Review, Long River Review, and Stickman Review.