"Small Repairs", "Lifting Stones", "At Forty-Nine", "What Time Does" & "In Passing" by Jeffery Allen Tobin

Small Repairs

It starts with hairline cracks—

the chip in the cup’s rim

you tilt your mouth around,

the hinge on the door

catching the frame just slightly wrong.

The floorboards bow near the heater,

softening under years of leaks

nobody quite fixed.

The window hums in a way

you only hear in winter,

a high, lonely frequency

no one bothers to tune out.

You think these things will hold,

patched with good-enough glue,

pressed down with passing hands.

You think they will go on—

this table, this wall,

this life you built up like scaffolding

over something hollow and shifting.

But the cracks are not waiting.

They are working.

Each tilt, each sigh of wood,

each tremor too small to notice,

is a little refusal, a little undoing.

And then the whole thing gives—

without ceremony,

without so much as a crack you can name—

and you are left standing there,

hands still full of tools,

facing the fact

that you were never repairing anything.

You were only making a slower kind of breaking.

Lifting Stones

We carried them one by one,

from the broken wall to the fence line,

each stone quickening against the skin,

a rough persistence we mistook

for something like purpose.

The dirt warmed through the soles of our boots,

the sun, thick as syrup, filled our sleeves.

We worked mostly in silence,

only the clink and scrape of stone

marking the hours as they sloughed past.

Once, when I faltered,

you steadied a rock against my chest—

and for a second, I mistook

the press of your hand

for something that would stay.

But everything we lifted

was already slipping from itself—

grit loosening at the seams,

the wall shrugging off its own shape,

the ground easing its grip.

Even the good work bends to loss.

Even the hand that steadies

must open again, must let go,

so that kindness, too,

becomes another thing we bury.

At Forty-Nine

You begin reading the obituaries,

at first just to make sure it’s not someone you know.

Then, after a while, you read them for practice.

You learn to carry grocery bags differently,

closer to the body, as if protecting something

that doesn’t heal as fast as it used to.

You stand longer in doorways,

forgetting why you meant to leave the room,

forgetting what exactly was so urgent.

It’s not regret that takes you by the collar—

it’s the small rearrangements:

the hair thinning at the temples,

the running shoes that seem smug in the closet,

the future no longer feeling like an arrow,

but more like a road that narrows into fields.

You tell yourself it’s fine.

Everyone gets here, if they’re lucky.

And anyway, there are still good chairs,

decent coffee, a few songs you haven’t worn out yet.

But some part of you knows—

without bitterness, without even surprise—

that you are no longer becoming anything.

You are what will be left behind.

What Time Does

The tree that leaned against the back fence

all those summers when we were young,

the one we were told would have to come down someday,

has grown taller, broader,

its limbs weaving a high green roof

that shades the porch now

where nobody sits.

The cracked sidewalk where we chalked our names

still runs downhill, but it’s buckled and heaved,

a slow shrugging off of everything we thought

could be kept in place.

I passed our old school last week—

a different name on the sign,

new windows, new doors—

the only thing left of what we knew

was the worn outline of a hopscotch board,

half-swallowed by the asphalt.

Time is kind and not so kind.

It lets some things soften at the edges,

the way anger wears itself out

like a shouted word in an empty room.

But it also sharpens small disappointments,

the slights you thought you’d let go,

the hurts you buried under bigger hurts.

It lets the tree keep growing

long after the house begins to sag.

It forgives what you meant to say,

but not what you said.

It forgets your promises

but remembers your failures

with a patience you never deserved.

And in the end, it leaves you here—

looking out across what you thought you built,

seeing what grew without you,

what stayed behind,

what outlived your best intentions.

In Passing

Where I am, something else is not.

Where I move, the space neglects me.

I leave no mark worth speaking of.

The fields settle behind me as if I were never there.

You must accept this fate,

you must not cling to simply

anything that floats.

The sky bends no different for me.

The trees turn without sorrow.

The names I once answered to

slip through the gaps in the air.

I am less a presence than a fold,

a soft rearrangement of distance.

A leaf turns, a door swings,

nothing stops to remember why.

Jeffery Allen Tobin is a political scientist and researcher based in South Florida. A Pushcart nominee, Jeffery 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.