Authors Note: I wrote “Aloha Shirt Man’s Inventory of the Beauty That Remains” during the summer of 2024. During the baseball season, I am a fervent follower of the Cincinnati Reds, who have either been woeful or have flirted with woefulness for far too many years. The night I drafted this poem, the Reds were playing a game against a team that would beat them with a football game type score. I started my draft with that sentiment, after which I started reflecting how my garden and gardening hopes were slipping away from me. I had had a heart attack and was wrestling with a groin pull and fat pad atrophy on my right heel. I’ve probably written four dozen Aloha Shirt Man poems. In most of them, Aloha Shirt Man has some sort of adventure. These poems are usually told from the third person point of view, but lately I’ve added several poems in which Aloha Shirt Man addresses the reader from the first person point of view. When writing, I lead my conscious self to the trapdoor to my unconscious, throw open the trapdoor while standing as close to the lip as possible, and welcome everything that rises. Once the created thing, in my case, a prose poem, takes shape I revise while trying to ascertain what the prose poem wants to be. It is my responsibility to work in service of the organic identity of the prose poem. I thought this piece turned out well. But the Reds got trounced that night, just as I feared they would.
A day after the Braves euthanized the Reds’ mathematical chances of playing in the postseason and left my hapless team with nine beancounter games to limp through to the season’s end, I loiter in the wreckage of my butterfly garden. Coneflowers and oxeyes, little bluestems and Queen Anne’s lace withering and browning beneath the summer-long drought. The sedum still salvaging a token drift of color despite the relentless heat. The goldenrod somehow thriving. My left groin burns as I limp past the thistle overrunning the site where I planted sunflowers in previous summers. The ball of my right heel crumbles beneath each footstep. Mulberry saplings have sprouted along the fencerow. Honeysuckle vines have crept through the barberry’s thorns. Burrs stick to the fabric of my jeans. To the bottom of my t-shirt. I lean against the trunk of the red maple that soars above its girdling roots. I place my palms against the resilient trunk, mumbling to the tree about my intentions to revitalize the pollinator garden. A stand of black sedum on the east side of the front porch and a shock of red coxcombs under the kitchen window. A bouquet of sunflowers along the fencerow. Skyscrapers, sundance kids, mammoths, earthwalkers, short haloed little beckas, and wine-dark chiantis. Choosing hybrids for their names as well as their mid-summer appearances. The time for woodsmoke has not yet arrived. Persimmons have not yet sweetened out their sour. I turn back to my house where the woebegone Reds warm up for a meaningless tilt against the Braves. Another Cincinnati rookie with two rainbow pitches takes the mound against Atlanta’s Cy Young candidate. The fragile heel balks beneath each step.
Brief Bio: Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. His prose poems have appeared in AGNI Online and Turtle Island Poetry Anthology and are forthcoming in Glint Literary Journal and Blue Fire. Brockley’s first full collection of prose poems, Iron Pennies, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag late this summer. Iron Pennies is available for pre-order from the Main Street Rag book store.
