Charlie Bondhus – Flagging (with "Red and White Quills" by Kevin Hinkle)























Tonight I forget about desire
its flap and whistle,
what I’ve been told
about being borne
cross continents
like a speck of dust
curlicuing through the air
on some great
mistral
wind.

Tonight I crave your
slackened flesh
with its suggestion
of a soul at rest
its inactive yearning
for the one secure
              beside it in the bed.

Tonight I remember the times I’ve loved
without the sirocco
of infatuation;
Those feelings
and their soft
              wrinkled
              ease

like an unironed t-shirt worn around the house
on a Sunday when you
poured me a glass of orange juice
and we spent the afternoon on the couch
and for a few hours understood
how it is
entirely possible
to live

without ecstasy.









Charlie Bondhus has published two books of poetry—What We Have Learned to Love, which won Brickhouse Books’s 2008-2009 Stonewall Competition, and How the Boy Might See It (Pecan Grove Press, 2009), a finalist for the 2007 Blue Light Press First Book Award. His poetry appears in numerous periodicals, including Assaracus, The Yale Journal for the Humanities in Medicine, The Q Review, and others. He frequently collaborates with the photographer Kevin Hinkle, who has participated in over twenty juried art shows around the country. Their poetry/photo collaborations have previously appeared in The Tulane Review and Grey Sparrow Journal.