Catherine Fletcher

Ballad of the Locksmith                          

After years as a Southland fixer, unlocking bank vaults and starlets’ homes,

nightwinging to open Beemer doors after valet hours,                     

trust clung to the locksmith like tar.  Needfulness broke him.

 

Suitcase full of lost days, he drove east,

hitched to a hunch.  He burned up the lanes,

passing nail salons, motels, and county fairs,

billboards with advertisements trying to be poems.

As the exurbs gave way to upland, he paused to refuel;

the tinny Unocal speakers played over the freeway’s hum.  

 

        I dream of stealing chairs from the vacant choir loft. 

        You claim to fill my cup—see how it brims with dust.

        So many demand sacrifice, worship without the sacred.

        Calls for respect’ll get a man excommunicated.

 

        These years have been a long, dull parade of morning moons 

        and neighborly indifference, masked by friendly banter—

 

        I’m too angry to be weary now.

        I’m too proud to be tender.

 

He fumed into the foothills.  He roamed

until road signs read like Tarot cards.

Near the oasis, he turned,

took a dangerous byway to a ghost town

of fences laden with tossed shoes

and Joshua trees, their branches extended in prayer.

The wind picked up and he swore

his car stereo was crackling with a missive.

 

        You demand I sell myself while acting like an angel.

        I’ve waited at the crossroads for God and for the Devil.

     

        On call since seventeen, my pains still go unheeded.

        I’m slipping out of range; my absence’ll be unnoticed.

 

        These years have been a long, dull parade of morning moons. 

        My head’s a haze of false freedoms, my body wracked by yearning.

 

        I’m too angry to be weary now.

        I’m too proud to be tender.

 

The locksmith arrived where tow trucks idle

at the edge of the river. He discovered ancient geoglyph lines,

followed them into the desert glare.

 

He paced inside the acres of windrows he found,

twisted round to find the key

to his disquiet. 

Squinting, he began to sing to the mesa and its grasses

as they trembled.

 

        Histories live in my feet, in the furrows on my face. 

        The world’s succumbed to greedy eyes and the images they expect.

        Want’s a viral fever which few baths can ever break,

        fed by distant shimmers, the last century’s still-famous fakes.

 

        Yet this land bears sleeping circles, wonders traced by divining.

        I’m caught between believe and broken now—

 

        too weary to be angry,

        too tender to be proud.

Catherine Fletcher is a Virginia-based writer. Recent work has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Naugatuck River Review, Under a Warm Green Linden, and the concert series Concept Lab. She was a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellow (2022) and a Creature Conserve Mentee (2022-23). She serves on the Poetry Society of Virginia’s Literary Advisory Board and Seven Cities Writers Project’s Board of Directors.