by Jim Ross
Play Ground
At first it was cool—the neon plastic playgrounds
they built at new schools or sometimes where
there were just tennis courts and maybe a sandbox
that neighborhood cats frequented for gossip and shit.
They put in the recycled tire safe-to-play-ground
to replace the sand and gravel we’d always known as land
when dangling from monkey bars by your knees—
except, the high monkey bars, which had packed dirt
underneath, you know—to make its lessons crystal clear
as the Pepsi variation that flew in and out of fashion
faster than a Hypercolor shirt’s fabrics outlived their
radicalness when pummeled by the dryer/washer one-two
punch. There were a few interim wooden castle-like playgrounds
that drew us out of our teenage bedroom funks
to play hide and go seek tag at dark, to chip teeth
like John whose name was John but we called Virgin
years after he planted that flag like a baby conquistador
conquering the dark corner of the sand box—which
they’ve taken out of playgrounds completely now.
Where are indoor/outdoor cats to crap when locked out
or cowering from the howls of crowded coyotes?
The Merry-go-round has fallen victim as well.
Centripetal metal bars whizzing by my head marked time
more clearly than calendars for a number of years.
The underside always a dark and deadly place
to get an ankle twisted in hundreds of pounds of spinning steel
like a monster under the bed of the kid had jumping
from deathtrap to safe, still ground. Oh, the days. I’m sure picnics
were around some of those park visits, but the physics
of all those steel contraptions capture my attention.
They’re all gone now. Poof! Like dandelion seeds.
Dandelions that hadn’t lost their yellow tuft to
momma had a baby and her head popped off
or roaming fawns and does in the still before morning.
Both deer and merry-go-rounds chased from suburbs.
It’s a lonely dinghy without them, sometimes.
Knowing of their absence from the now-places of the past.
Poorer counties have their old merry-go-rounds
killing grass behind a courthouse or maintenance shed
on permanent auction, but what responsible parent
installs a deathtrap like that? Even 90’s Robin Williams antics
couldn’t play that body-crushing toy off as curious-but-safe
no matter how many diced up tires make up its play ground,
and still I want one, how fucking rad would that be?
A massive Lazy Susan with solid handgrips
for dizzying trips into the centrifuge of back when.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, Gone Lawn, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. His short prose chapbook, Between Even Rows of Trees, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions.
Jim Ross jumped into creative pursuits in 2015 after a rewarding research career. With graduate degree from Howard University, in ten years he’s published nonfiction, fiction, poetry, photography, hybrid, interviews, and plays in over 200 journals on five continents. Best-of-the-Net nominated in nonfiction and art, his photo publications include Barnstorm, Camas, Feral, Phoebe, and Stonecoast. Photo-essays include Burningword, Kestrel, Litro, New World Writing, Pilgrimage, Sweet, and Typehouse. Jim’s family splits time between city and mountains.