7:21 PM
Oil City

by Kenneth Godoy

It’s that kind of town,
that rains
two hours until twilight.

A drench that soaks the dry space between my fingers.

Teenage girls with cut-offs stand lock-kneed on the stoop
adjacent to the burned house.

It’s that kind of town,
where things burn sometimes
and the heat of afternoon drips from the corner of the ACs into red buckets.

2

When the rains took over,
we crawled underneath a bridge then as a shelter,
and we surrendered ourselves to the moment,
like a child,
because his mother’s breast is all he knows.

He does not comprehend change of matters;
that lives collide
and old skin peals away
and souls rejoin;

he doesn’t feel the angst of love. Does he?
He doesn’t hate himself.

3

Blessed is the man who is that constant child.

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Of his writing, Kenneth Godoy says, “Poetry is bound to my soul.”