Ivan Young

Ferris Wheel

Where I fall from the sky,

the night is a garish woman decked in lights.

A country love song drifts from the grandstand.

I listen to the siren

screaming in the distance: we got a winner here.

Below me

the funhouse flashing lights, haunted laughter

swallowed by the Horror House doors, the couples

clinging to each other. The Galaxy

whips its octopus arms

throwing children into their screaming faces,

and this wheel keeps

dipping

into the crowd

like a giant mill. The air is heavy

with popcorn

and fry grease,

and I can see a carney in the shadows

of a semi, smoking, picking at his face.

Love is not the right word for the way

I plunge

Into the metal work arms, lift again

toward that sickle of a moon, seduced

by the simple motion,

by a woman

holding a cone of cotton candy who waves

as I pass and licks the sweetness from her fingers.

IVAN YOUNG is the author of Smell of Salt, Ghost of Rain (Brick House Books 2015). His work has been featured by American Life in Poetry and has won the Apple Valley Review’s Editor’s Prize, a Mayor’s Award through the Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation, and was runner-up for the 2018 RHINO Founder’s Prize.