Joseph Bathanti

Catharsis

After wrestling practice, I wait at Fifth & Neville
for the 71 Negley—still downtown,

crawling along frozen rivers a rush-hour blizzard.
Stuffed in my gym bag are stinking sweats and Sophocles.

The second day of Lent—so cold spit freezes
when it strikes the telephone pole—

church sanctuaries disguise in purple,
the Resurrection so distant, it seems impossible.

Across the avenue beckons Cathedral Pharmacy,
forbidden, blinding as Hopper:

buttered toast, lemon cokes, a blond Candy Striper,
the danger of slipping through the portal of regret

into the maudlin ache for Heaven.
Hopper is dead not quite a year,

though I’ve not heard of him, not yet,
nor Neal Cassady, gone too, just days before,

in the icy gall of February,
a month of no expectation for starvelings—

just the spit-jar and bum bracket seed
with a veiny cock-strong psycho in the tournament.

Packed with straphangers, cigarettes and slush,
the bus finally wheezes to the curb.

A few bundled stiffs tumble out the center doors.
I grab a strap and dangle.

Down to one lane, we lurch meter by meter,
swaying against one another.

Our faces glare back at us in the long window:
forgettery, sacrilegious fatigue,

the illusion a home awaits.
Salt crews sidle in with slag.

Lorry chains ring.
After an hour, I score a seat,

open my book to what happens
when the prideful piss off God—

an exam tomorrow on Aristotelian tragedy,
then the match: stripped, on a frigid scale,

pleading with God I make weight
in a moldy Southside locker-room.

Facing me sleeps a woman:
lipstick, earrings, gold pin on her heavy red coat,

purse locked in her elbow,
black high-heeled boots toggled to the ankle—

this apparition: my mother,
fighting to wake in the preternatural light,

snow—petals of it, wet white—
fleecing behind her the lonesome night.

How like her: here all along since boarding
two hours earlier under Kaufmann’s clock

after ten hours in a basement tailor shop,
chained to a sewing machine.

When she opens her eyes, she doesn’t know where she is.
The gauzy night impersonates dream.

Finally, she smiles and pats the empty seat beside her.
The last two—the bus skids to its final stop—

we slash home through drifts along the reservoir.
Ducks paddle the sky.

Giuseppe Moretti’s 1896 bronze statues—
naked women—gate piers at the threshold

of Highland Park, in flimsy shawls
of rime, lift torches.

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Joseph Bathanti is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. The author of over twenty books, Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and is the recipient of the Board of Governors Excellence in Teaching Award. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. His volume of poetry, Steady Daylight, from Louisiana State University Press, is forthcoming in 2026. He was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in October of 2024.