Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Pride Month Poem: “Nudging Man” by The Poet Spiel


It’s Pride Month at Reiter’s Block? How can you tell?

As I did last June, this month I’ll be showcasing the work of GLBT authors I admire. I’m hoping to have time for some book and movie reviews, as well. First up, we have The Poet Spiel, a widely published author and performance poet, whose work has been featured on the Poets Against War website. His chapbooks include come here cowboy: poems of war (Pudding House Publications, 2006) and once upon a farmboy (Madman Ink, 2008).

Nudging Man

You wonder why that kid doesn’t just stay at home
till maybe 2:00 a.m.—watch Carson—
give his eyelids the cucumber treatment—
because he gets so stiff he can barely lift his warm
         beer to his face.

How he reminds you of when you pick up
         a small bird
which has crashed into your kitchen window
and it becomes completely still; it does not resist;
it does not know where it is; it does not know
         what it is.

You’ve always figured it was waiting for
         something familiar,
another bird, to nudge it, to call to it.
But the best that you can do
is place it gently in the warmth of your armpit

in the darkness of that space where nothing
         threatens it
and your body heat and the beating of your heart
are without a name
and you sense that that familiarity makes the bird
         become whole again.

You see the kid every night when you slide
         him a Schlitz-on-draft
across your bar—
never expecting a tip. A kid like him
will nurse one beer from 10:05, when he arrives,
         till the moment
when he scores: fifteen minutes before
         you close.

It takes him an hour to rise up from the barstool,
move across the room for a different point
         of view—
to where the quantity of men for choosing
         is mounting.
He’s barely touched his beer

but his eyes are darting; exposing signs of wanting.
Wanting it bad.
He’s available but shows no sense of knowing
         he has a right
to declare that he is present, as in speaking
         out loud:

“I’ve seen you here before can I buy you a beer,”
as if he fears his voice, his presence, will
         reveal himself to himself;
that this can only happen by the revelation
of the recognition of him by another man.

So each hour he repositions, stands as near as he
         can stand to a man—
nudges one of them.
But he cannot say a single word.
Then another; he nudges another and another.

This kid touches them but he cannot speak.

By 2 a.m. the men are sweaty and anxious
for the hot trick they’ve come here to find.
And the kid is nudging more of them
and nudging them more aggressively.

The room is reckless. Most patrons are drunk
and you’re hollering out Last call!
before they head on to the after hours bars
where some of them will do it raw, on site;

but you overhear the kid,
standing just inside the doorway at the far
         end of your bar,
not drunk at all,
just as you’ve heard him so many times
         at 2:15 a.m.,

point blank, his eyes certain,
entertaining the potential of unskinned meat
         from some happy nighthawk:
“You wanna fuck?”
and he gets the nod every time.

You guess he finds himself while in bed—
when he is naked—
in the reflection of another man—
where you guess he is not as silent
         as a stricken bird.

Donal Mahoney: “The Man Who Lives in the Gym”


The Man Who Lives in the Gym

    St. Procopius College
    after World War II

The man who lives in the gym
sleeps in a nook up the stairs
to the rear. Since Poland
he’s slept there, his tools
bright in a box locked

under his bed. At noon bells
call him down to the stones
that weave under oaks to the abbey
where he at long table takes
meals with the others
the monks have left in

for a week, or a month, or a year
or forever, whatever
the need. The others all know
that in Poland his wife
had been skewered, his children
partitioned, that he had escaped

in a freight car of hams.
So when Brother brings in, on a gun
metal tray, orange sherbet for all
in little green dishes,
they blink at his smile,
they join in his laughter.

first published in The Davidson Miscellany, Vol. 7 No. 2, 1972
Davidson, NC


William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “The Newborn Mother’s Eye”


(For Calvin Ramsey)

 

Tell me Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother hold her son fresh;

from the battle of natural delivery;

 

where she places him to her full breast,

this emblem of love,

on her sweating chest;

 

you, Daddy Warbucks, so willing to

sacrifice other babies, for your lying

doctrines of truth, justice, and the

 

American way?

 

I say to you again,

 

did you ever see a new mother, as she watches her son

crawl for the first time?

 

screaming in delight as he and his new puppy

scamper close to your DMZ,

 

when the summertime brought the lightning

bugs for a silent communion with the eternal,

 

and her only child learned to eat

watermelon without swallowing the seeds,

 

And this mother knew,

 

it could not last beyond the next war cloud on the horizon;

her only son’s life was not worth the dog tags given him,

 

by all of us;

 

While tin sabers rattled,

and we invented enemies who did not look like us.

 

While pretty little Pentagon cheerleaders sang, “Hit em,

Hit em, Hit em harder, if artillery can’t do it, napalm
can!”

 

Tell me, Colonel Sawbones,

 

did you ever see a new mother as she watched her son came home

on silent weeping,

 

zipped up in a plastic body bag,

so shiny and final,

placed itself in front of her,

 

while she,

 

could not believe her eyes,

 

that her friends and neighbors had come like

a thief in the night

 

to take her only child away,

and ship him to a far off to a foreign

trench,

 

when they, themselves,

 

held barren wombs,

and pot bellied mouths,

 

for there is no cause so just,

no battle so, won,

no defeat, so singed,

 

that can replace this look,

 

in the newborn mother’s eye…

Blog Love for Ariana Reines: Interviews and Readings Online


Ariana Reines. What can I say? If she were a band, I’d follow her around like a Deadhead. I would name a beef-flavored ice cream after her. But that would probably freak her out, so instead, here are some links to her awesomeness online so you can see for yourself.

The poet Thomas Moore interviewed her on his blog in 2007, after her book The Cow was published by Fence Books. Moore says, “To refer to The Cow, as poetry, seems rather reductive – it feels more like a living creature. Using the cold, clinical language of the abattoir, mixed with a fragmented cut-up of various characters – Reines has sculpted a multi-faceted yet cohesive voice that forces the reader into avenues of sex, scat and violence. Words don’t do this thing justice.” Here, Reines speaks about the freedom from self-consciousness that so inspired me in her work:

I want to say something about bad writing. I’m proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston’s bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire’s mamma’s boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which’s something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.

This hour-long video shows Ariana reading at the Holloway Series in Poetry, UC Berkeley, in April 2008:

And this half-hour radio program was first broadcast on KCRW’s “Bookworm” program, also last April.

Mark D. Hart: “Planting Garlic”


Mark D. Hart, a Buddhist meditation teacher and award-winning poet, read the poem below at the Karuna Center in Northampton last year, at a 20th anniversary celebration for the Northampton Insight Meditation Community. It was first published in the October 2008 issue of Midwest Quarterly. He’s kindly permitted me to reprint it on this blog. Read Mark’s Honorable Mention prize poem from the 2007 Winning Writers War Poetry Contest here.

Planting Garlic

I love to imagine the first blind rootings
in gravity’s dark light, the sodden waiting,
the slow ignition of their tiny green rockets

as I bury their pink-skinned cheeks in the
corpse-cold ground, soon freezing to stone.
My neighbor says the mounded beds look like

freshly dug graves. He’s right—I am
an undertaker for the living, consigning innocents
to birth not death, though

not every womb is warm. Let this planting
stand for all inhospitable beginnings,
for what shivers unseen awaiting its chance.

Foot to shovel, back to wind, sky dour with
coming rain, crows squawking, a few creaking pines,
the hoarse whisper of corn stalks blowing,

their dry matter to be thrown on the pile—
I could work up a good sweat of melancholy here
if wonder were not constantly interrupting.

I’m fifty. I take no comfort in the rites of religion.
Let me see the miracle before me,
the one I too am.

Let planting bring me to my knees.

Book Notes: Nobody’s Mother


Northampton poet laureate Lesléa Newman is the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose for children and adults, including the poetry collections Still Life with Buddy and Signs of Love. She was one of the first authors to write children’s books for gay and lesbian families, the best known of which is Heather Has Two Mommies.

Her latest poetry collection for adults, Nobody’s Mother (Port Orchard, Wash.: Orchard House Press, 2009), is an autobiography in verse, narrated in a likeable voice that will resonate with a wide audience. Its themes include feminism, aging, the complexity of mother-daughter relationships, and nostalgia for Jewish culture along with a critique of its patriarchal and warlike aspects. Along the way, Newman offers such delights as an ode to Manhattan’s now-shuttered Second Avenue Deli, and a playfully erotic exploration of middle-aged love.

Newman is closely attuned to the duality of our core experiences–our love-hate relationships with God, tradition, family, and our own bodies, to name a few. In the first section, “Nobody’s Mother”, she portrays her own mother’s emotional unavailability and resentment of her children, with a sharp eye and a wounded heart. At the same time, the author demonstrates compassion for her mother, seeing her from a feminist perspective as one of many women forced to choose between parenthood and personhood.

Other poems in this section reveal that Newman made the opposite choice. Her pride in her independence mingles with tender sadness for the daughter she will never have. “The Bad Mother” could be about either the narrator or her mother, depending on how it’s read:

…The bad mother never
thought she had
what it takes
to be
a good mother

The bad mother never
let her daughter
out of her womb
to prove
that she was wrong

The book’s second section, “A Real Princess”, sketches the characters of her Jewish family: the beloved dog, the aunts playing mah-jongg (“Company”), the distant father whose one effort at family closeness (“How to Make Matzoh Brei”) is treasured more than the mother’s daily unsung labors. However, amid these cozy scenes, the girl-child is also learning to associate her body with shame and danger. While the aunts gossip and laugh downstairs, the narrator is listening with dread for the sound of her older brother’s knock on her bedroom door:

…”Want company?” he asked
and though I never answered
he came in anyway
and did what older brothers often do

to younger sisters too ugly to date
while their father sleeps
and their mother laughs
and the telephone doesn’t ring

In the third section, “Classy Dame”, Newman engages in feminist midrash, fighting to inscribe her experience in the Jewish texts and traditions that are an inescapable part of her identity. The poem “Minyan” conveys how her grief at her grandmother’s death was compounded by the rule that women do not count towards the quorum of ten mourners required for the Kaddish.

…Dear God,

if a woman sobs
at her grandmother’s grave

and there’s no one there
to hear

has a sound
really been made?

In “What the Angel Really Said”, Newman turns the binding of Isaac into a classic Jewish comedy routine with an edge, using humor to puncture the patriarchal arrogance that sacrifices human beings to abstractions:

…Abraham, I’m warning you
unless you loosen the ties that bind
right this very minute
I’m going to have to declare you
an unfit parent. I’m going to have to
call the authorities who are going to have
to call the Department of Social Services
who are going to have to place the boy
in foster care and then may God
have mercy on his soul.
Already he’s going to spend
the next two hundred years
in therapy kvetching about his father
the meshugeneh who tried to kill him
because he loved some God
he had never seen
more than he loved his own flesh and blood.

Newman here creates an alternate mythology of original sin, suggesting that the root of our present evils is not disobedience to an arbitrary command but rather the opposite, the failure to recognize that human love is the truest expression of what God wants. Though her lesbianism plays a surprisingly small role in this book, this way of reading the Bible seems informed by our contemporary struggles over sex and gender in our religious institutions.

The last section, “Age Before Beauty”, includes often-whimsical homages to role models who have helped Newman love herself as a middle-aged woman. These range from literary icons Grace Paley and Virginia Woolf to a majestic, weathered old tortoise that she once saw crossing the road. It’s a hopeful ending to a collection that bravely explored some dark places.

Below, reprinted with permission, is “The Woodgatherer Speaks”, one of the book’s strongest poems about the intersection of faith and power. I love how it connects scapegoating to the reminder that there’s always so much we don’t know about a person, or a text, or (especially) God. Mob violence is the opposite of the humility that allows a multiplicity of voices.

The Woodgatherer Speaks


Once when the Israelites were in the wilderness, they came upon a man gathering wood on the
sabbath day. Those who found him as he was gathering wood brought him before Moses, Aaron
and the whole community. He was placed in custody, for it had not been specified what should
be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death: the whole community
shall pelt him with stones outside the camp.” So the whole community took him outside the camp
and stoned him to death—as the Lord had commanded Moses. (Numbers 15:32-15:36)

It was a sunny day
It was a cloudy day

It was early morning
It was late afternoon

I was gathering wood to build a fire
to warm myself

I was gathering wood to build a fire
to cook myself a meal

I was gathering wood to build a fire
that was never lit
yet burns for all time

I still tasted the bitterness of slavery
and did not care about keeping the Sabbath

I cared about keeping the Sabbath so much
I sacrificed my life so others would remember

I was selfish
I was self-less

Some say my name is Tzelofechad
and my five brave daughters
Machlah, No’ah, Choglah, Milkah and Tirtzah
are my legacy

Others insist I am a nameless man
known only for the worst thing I did
on the worst day of my life

Here is the truth:

I was gathering wood on the Sabbath Day
I was warned three times to stop

I was gathering wood on the Sabbath Day
no one said a word

I was brought before Moses and Aaron
They put me in custody
Then Moses spoke with God

God said to Moses, Remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy
God said to Moses Thou shalt not kill
God said to Moses Take this man outside the camp
Have the whole community stone him to death

Moses said to God
Pardon the iniquity of this man
according to Your great kindness
as You have forgiven the people Israel
ever since Egypt

Moses said: nothing

When I heard my fate
I stood still as a stone

I was struck first
by a rock
the size of the apple
Eve shared with Adam

I was struck first
by a small pebble
that was later placed
on my grave

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of a stranger

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of a friend

The first stone
was thrown
by the hand of my daughter

The first stone
was thrown
b’ yad Moshe

The stones came hard and fast as rain
The stones came slowly, a lifetime apart

I stood upright
I fell to the ground

I cursed God
whom I did not believe in
I prayed to God
whom I loved with all my heart

As I lie on the earth
bruised and broken
a grasshopper leapt near my face
looked into my eyes
and sang a song so sweet
it broke my heart
and healed it

The grasshopper died beside me
The grasshopper hopped away

My life ended thousands of years ago
I am alive today

I gather wood on the scrolls of your Torah
I dance on the fringes of your tzitzit
I wander through the corners of your mind
as you sit in shul on Shabbat
and contemplate
the meaning of your life
the meaning of mine

Poetry Roundup: Koeneke, Minnis


How much is too much? I recently read two poetry books, Chelsey Minnis’ Bad Bad (Fence Books) and Rodney Koeneke’s Rouge State (Pavement Saw Press), that were enjoyable and frustrating for similar reasons. Both started with a clever and unique style, and both had that essential ingredient of self-mockery that keeps experimental poetry from becoming a new pretentious orthodoxy. Both books also luxuriated in excesses of language and imagery: Koeneke marrying the Orientalist fantasies of sheiks and odalisques to the trappings of suburban consumerism, Minnis describing poetry as “lickable mink” and a “doorknob covered with honey”. Yet there were places in both books where I felt fatigued, because every poem seemed to be in the same tone of voice and be funny/experimental/surreal in exactly the same way.

The cover of Bad Bad is striped Barbie-pink and white with red gothic-type letters, as if to code it “girly product, not to be taken seriously”. Of course, placing these graphics on the august cover of A Poetry Book invites us to rethink the seriousness of both girls and poetry.

Adopting the persona of a naughty little girl, the speaker of this book deflects criticism by flaunting her frivolity, yet at the same time secretly hopes to impress everyone with her cleverness. This is especially evident in Bad Bad‘s 68 “Prefaces”, my favorite section. Here’s a taste:

Preface 13

When I write a poem it’s like looking through a knothole into a velvet fuckpad…

And it is like buttery sweetbreads spilled down the front of your dress…

It is like a gun held to the head of a poodle…

If I want to write any poems I will write them!

A poem that doesn’t have any intellectual filler in it…

Like two blondes fighting on a roof…

****

Preface 20

I am a poet so I can say things…

And not so that I can have any notion of a literary lifestyle…

I don’t like to be a poet but how else can I be so fitful?

When I say “I am a poet” I expect I am saying something that is neutral of all self-congratulations…

I am saying, “I have a special quality that is like swan shit on marble…”

****

Preface 36

“Poetry writing” is a hardship

Like crying because you don’t like the wallpaper…

It is like bleeding from your anus in the snow…

But I don’t like it…

In the “Prefaces”, Minnis
tries having it both ways: she flaunts her vain and sensual motives for writing poetry, but equally flaunts her self-knowledge, as if to convince us that ironic frivolousness is not really frivolous. That coy refusal to resolve the paradox provides a great part of the pleasure of reading Bad Bad. Minnis’ surprising use of language is the other thing I most enjoyed about the book. Even when I became impatient with its limited range of themes and emotions, I kept laughing at passages that deftly spun from melodrama to true remorse to ridiculousness and back again, such as these lines from “Double Black Tulip”:

………….I write this poem like a girl in a black wig……
…………
…………………………………………………………………………
…………but my heart is the heart of a true skunk…………
…………………………………………………………….
……………………………………………..
…………..this is bad fluffy thoughts.
.     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
……………………………..like the hurtfulness of chartreuse
…………………………………………………………..carpet………
……………………….I must try not to feel a fake kindness….

Though I am a fashion junkie, I got bogged down in the 16-page poem “Foxina”, which is basically a list of sensual, outrageous, fetishistic clothing that “the women in the viewing boxes” are wearing. In my opinion, this poem shows up the limitations of a book that is composed of clever fragments. Not every poetry collection needs a traditional narrative arc, but if I’m reading from cover to cover, I like to feel some movement, some development of consciousness, such that the poems at the end of the book could only belong at the end and are informed by the journey that preceded it.

Which brings me to another question: Is a structured poetry book “better” than an unstructured one? Should I be blaming a box of chocolates for not being a three-course meal? I’ve enjoyed a number of collections where the individual poems were not dazzling, but the overall effect was powerful, because the pieces informed one another; like chapters of a novel, they might not all stand alone, but they belonged together. If Bad Bad is a box of chocolates, to be dipped into rather than consumed in one sitting, it’s like the chili-powder-and-Pop-Rocks truffles that my husband bought me for Valentine’s Day. Pacing is everything once the novelty wears off, but what a novelty it is.

The above comments would also apply to Koeneke’s Rouge State, another book whose abundance of surface variation was not always enough to compensate for the poems’ underlying sameness. Rouge State won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award, and the post-9/11 date gives us a key to the poems’ political context, providing a backdrop of passion and fear that is rarely invoked directly by Koeneke’s pleasantly aimless language. The raw material of Koeneke’s poems is Western colonialist fantasies and how they might be processed by people with no cultural literacy–people whose minds are full of catchy phrases and bits of information, but without the attention span or historical awareness to put them together properly. Rouge State is like “The Waste Land” written by a likeable, confused, somewhat ADD-afflicted American teenager deployed to Iraq.

           from #38

…Tonight’s ceremony will require your bride’s
virginity. Spread nard over the bedclothes
and charge it up to the hotel. The poppies mean
we’re leaving. It was a once-in-a-lifetime
sort of thing–the seeds were used for visions
and the husks served as clothes.
On the airport concourse you’ll notice a series
of fluorescent yellow cannisters: please put them down
at once. The people were so sorry when
we told them you were leaving–
that’s why I think they’re doing
that funny little dance.

Such naivete should be dangerous, but a sense of menace is mostly lacking from Rouge State, which relies perhaps too much on its readers’ knowledge of extra-textual facts to give the book its urgency. As with Bad Bad, Koeneke’s poems can be enjoyed for the reckless abundance of their vocabulary and imagery. Some of the poems could be said to have a meaning or a narrative thread, while others are more cryptic. Untitled, they are numbered from 1-50, and I couldn’t say that I discerned a reason behind the order of poems: the speaker doesn’t seem to have reached any insight by #50 that he didn’t have halfway through. In fact, quite the opposite:

#50

Summer acrostic hotshot,
Urgent as a somnambulist.
Create in me a clean heart, Zardoz–
Krazy-glue gentile moils upon me.

Orangutans, start your gonads:
Not one of you gets out of Zaire alive.

The thing I learned at scribe camp:
Hermes is vowels. Graminivores
In igloos eat more teeth.
So much for that Hummer the

Orotund senator sent round–
She got spotted on the parkway, imploring
Apaches to land.
“My, what cheesy palms you have, Sir Swithin.”
All I ever wanted was free beer.

I have come late to the appreciation of this nonlinear type of poetry, so other readers might be more patient about pushing through its difficulties. For me, an author needs a good reason to depart from recognizable modes of communication. I’m less interested in technique for its own sake. For example, in The Cow, Ariana Reines uses fragmentary and bizarre language because the passion of a speaker fighting her way back from madness to sanity bursts the bonds of ordinary rational thought.

The rationale for enigmatic speech in Rouge State might be to show that Americans have lost the ability to think clearly about the political power we wield. However, this seems like more of a conceptual point than an emotional necessity, and once made, perhaps does not need to be repeated so often. Does nonsense-humor trivialize this type of subject, whereas satire might have provided some reparative insight?

I did enjoy Rouge State, on the whole, because I read it over several weeks and could slow down to appreciate the experience of each poem, notwithstanding how familiar that experience sometimes was, underneath the inspired nuttiness of the vocabulary. And there were some brilliant passages, my favorite being this one from #39:

Ego is an autopsy
at which you’re a guest but also its theater,
a space in which no detail is too small to be applauded, but only once
the scalpels go to town.

With more such moments of profound analysis thrown in among the non sequiturs, Rouge State could have been an even more satisfying book. I have confidence in Koeneke’s imaginative powers and will be interested to see the direction of his subsequent work.

Michael Broder: “The Remembered One”


Poet and classics scholar Michael Broder presented his work at a panel discussion on “Poetic Responses to AIDS” at AWP Chicago last week. He has kindly given me permission to reprint one of those poems below.

The Remembered One

The good die young, but sometimes
    they come back, dripping with something
        we can’t name or identify,
an acrid perfume, or they reach for us
        like a taproot, draining
our sweet wells of oblivion
        until we lie drenched in a common sweat,
        our bed sheet their burial shroud, their moldering crust.

I dreamt of Marcos last night.
    I thought he came to be buried,
        to be done with; but no, that caramel devil,
leaving his tangerine swim trunks wet on the floor,
        toweling his gorgon hair as he sits in my lap,
numbing me with the poppies
        of his opiate grin and reasserting his claim:

Why should you get the house,
    the husband, the PhD, while I chew on dirt
        and feed succeeding generations
of night crawlers?
        I can crawl the night too, you know, the night is crawling
with me, with mine, with ours—
        us—
        while you pretend to walk, awake, alive.

Come with me, why don’t you, make once and for all
    the descent you practiced so ably for so many years.
        I know a place with many darkened corners
where you can crawl on hands and knees
        like in the old days—
What’s that you called it? “the old ich-du…”

We are beautiful there, and legion.
    We will keep you busy for centuries.
        And think what precious memories he will have,
here above—

This is the song you have waited so long to sing, isn’t it?

****

Michael Broder holds an MFA from New York University and is completing a PhD in Classics from The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His poems have appeared in Bloom, Court Green, and Painted Bride Quarterly, among other journals and anthologies. His essay on Sappho is included in My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack and due out from the University of Wisconsin Press this spring. His book manuscript, This Life Now, is awaiting a publisher. Visit www.mbroder.com for links to online publication. Michael can be contacted at mbroder@mbroder.com .

The Poet Spiel: “the end”


the end

            i don’t think
        anyone cried
on the first day

but
there was loud silence
around
the kitchen table

dad phoned
the wheat-threshers
told them
there would be
no filthy sweat work

one out-of-hell
sweep of hail
had wasted his readied crop
one day too soon

no one wanted to talk
so i hid my mouth upstairs
just played and played my harry belafonte
till it numbed me dead

when i came to
my dumbed diamond needle
was banging
deep grooves in my head

my folks were still
in the kitchen
staring
at dark

the dogs were scratching
our screendoor
and i wasn’t sure if
the cows had been milked

                my dad had to quit 
            a lifetime 
        dedicated 
    to farming

and we had to move
where our only harvest
was just a dumb little patch
of green grass where i rooted

a pussy willow cutting
hoping it might spring up
to cast cover over
the naked bathroom window

of a little white house
crammed between
everybody-strangers
who did not have trucks

who made their lights
push through
my bedroom walls
after bedtime

and me just listening
to the slick-black street
where a kid could not
kick dirt


This poem was reprinted by permission from The Poet Spiel’s chapbook once upon a farmboy (Madman Ink, 2008). Visit his website here.