Ben Groner III

C Boarding Group

The gate attendant jokes
he’s saved the best for last,
like in Cana when guests
tasted the best in the last hour
and two thousand years later
we still can’t fathom such
a shrug of generosity.
When was the last time
we spoke with our neighbors
down the street? And what
can’t a son trace back to his
mother? Mine wept as I flew
two thousand miles away
to sizzling parrillada, vino tinto,
chalky canyons, freezing rapids.
As we all link arms on the rim
of the raft, the stranger’s hair
soaked and eyes sunshot,
our shoulders cool to the other’s
touch, we are transmuted into
a speeding O down the throat
of the land’s untapped desire—
afterwards, as we change
back into dry clothes
in the hostel, I have no need
for a miracle, for wine to be
anything but Malbec, for
water to be anything but river.

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Ben Groner III (Nashville, TN), recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination and Texas A&M University’s 2014 Gordone Award for undergraduate poetry, has work published in Rust + Moth, GASHER, Cheat River Review, Whale Road Review, Stirring and elsewhere. He’s also a former bookseller at Parnassus Books. You can see more of his work at bengroner.com/creative-writing/