~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Jeffery Allen Tobin

The Knife That Carves the Day

I wake up inside a morning that doesn’t care if I wake up.

The sky is a dull coin flipped by someone who’s already forgotten the bet.

Birds carve their small brutalities into the air,

slicing the silence like old men whittling away the edge of time.

I make coffee, because rituals are the only gods left,

and someone once told me you have to believe in something

or the day will carve you instead.

Out by the road, a deer is dead.

The sun is coming apart inside its open body,

spilling gold into a wound it will never heal.

I should call someone. A county truck. A neighbor.

But instead, I stare,

as if looking long enough might change the ending.

You left, of course, because that’s what people do.

They make promises like unlit matches

and then strike them against the wrong kind of wind.

Somewhere, you are smiling into the warm hand of another morning,

your voice like a river that never once ran dry.

I tell myself this is fine, that everyone is an eventual ghost,

that loss is the only thing life gives for free.

The coffee burns my tongue. The deer is still dead.

And the day, the whole unforgiving day,

keeps going, as if nothing ever happened.

Jeffery Allen Tobin is a political scientist and researcher based in South Florida. He has been writing for more than 30 years. His latest poetry collection, Scars & Fresh Paint, was published in 2024 with Kelsay Books, and his poetry, prose, and essays have been featured in many journals, magazines, and websites.