The Fallen
Gabriel Welsch Our small town empties on Memorial Day after the shine of parades chugging with Harleys and sousaphones tuned to the last days of a school year already long over. The legion lot full and the bar deep in the glossy sentiment for fallen friends. It’s no place, here, for doubt. Love of home is as certain as polished chrome-- only in the back yards still clutched in early spider webs does anyone talk of the uncle, the violent drunk, the DUIs, the restraining order, how Eric hasn’t seen his daughter in nine years, how Ron’s goats chew a lawn he can’t mow because the pitch of the engine is the whine he heard just before the fireball took-- well, that’s what we don’t know. We want to talk and make up the missing parts, because it’s easy to say things we think can fill a loss. The towns empty, the lake fills with boats, mortgaged islands floating with beer far from the sight of land, water the opposite of sand, clear skies the opposite of ghosts, bullshit the opposite of memory, canopy shade the opposite of sunlight and even of the long shadows advancing on the water as the drunken dusk catches everyone suddenly, unaware. |
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About the Author: Gabriel Welsch is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse (Steel Toe Books, 2013). His fiction and poetry has appeared in journals including Georgia Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, and on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” Recent work appears in decomP, Trampset, Cleaver, Thrush, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, and Moon City Review. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, and teaches occasionally at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center.