Christopher Blackman
Poetry
Christopher Blackman is a poet from Columbus, Ohio. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, DIAGRAM, Cleaver Magazine, Southeast Review, and Sixth Finch, among other publications. He received his MFA from Columbia University and is an instructor for the Kenyon Review Young Writers’ Workshop. His debut book of poems, Three-day Weekend, won the Gunpowder Press Dryden-Vreeland Book Prize, and is forthcoming in 2024. He currently lives in Boston.
Three-Day Weekend
Up there, it narrows from two lanes to one,
backing up traffic the whole way home,
but I don’t mind. It’s Friday before dark
and I’m in love with the world again,
from the opening bars of “Hotel California”
to the quality of the light at this particular hour,
this longest possible interval before being
thrust back to the working week once more.
The men and women who fought for our rest
wanted it this way: three days of freedom,
instead of two. Life is full of compromise—
we zipper merge, each vehicle ceding ground
to the next until we’re a single line, the shadows
of trees and buildings passing across my eyes
like a zoetrope. A century and a half ago,
in Europe, my family’s store was burned,
so they came to America and sold matchbooks,
their lives a testimony to the effectiveness
of their product. When I’m depressed, I feel guilty
for having grown soft in relative comfort,
despite my ancestors’ sacrifice. I don’t even want
to look at the wreck that caused us
to come together, though it seems like a bad one—
splintered pole, downed lines, flashing lights.
No way anybody walked away from that.
“
Traffic is a funny thing. I moved from New York City, where I never had to drive, to the Boston area, where I have to drive everywhere. For six months I encountered lane closures on my commute home. Each night we all had to do our little routine to get into one lane and get home.”
