Dan Kelty is a high school Spanish teacher in St. Louis, Missouri, where he lives with his two children. He has been published in Nimrod, White Pelican Review, Sleetmagazine and other literary journals.
Markie
His mom’s heavy.
But he’s all lank. What little
flesh on his legs is muscle.
It has to be. Or
he wouldn’t be able to walk
the two hundred yards to his
bus stop or the two miles
to school, gliding underneath
his thin mop of short hair
his mom can’t get him
to wash. Spitting as he walks,
he could never conceive that anyone
would be watching him as he
walks past the gas station, library,
strip mall thinking about classmates,
scenarios, inclusion, rocks he used
to find in the creek, which his
father, too much like him, urged him
away from, distant and impatient.
Too much like him,
tall and lanky standing there
in the hot sun, away from
the shade of the mulberries
where Mark turned over
the rocks. Fossil, fossil,
covering the bottom just
like he had talked about
in school: cephalopods and
ammonites, burned into
stone too long ago
to unravel now.
