Route 7 Review | Page 89

JERRY BATS By Kenneth Pobo at the many icicles weighing down old gutters. They crash into pieces, the sound making him grin under leafless trees. Jerry lets the fragments lay, sun glinting off each one. He could wait for a warm day to melt them, but he grabs his gloves and goes out, saves the biggest for last, the one hanging beyond the dining room like an ice tree root. He taps the shovel against it a few times until chunks fall where dragon wing begonias had bloomed, a light red made of dusk before autumn set its trap. Kenneth Pobo has a new book out from Urban Farmhouse Press called Booking Rooms in the Kuiper Belt. He has work forthcoming in: Eclectica, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Sweet Tree Review, Verse-Virtual, and elsewhere.