WHAT MY PARENTS WANT

At 86 Dad wants a new silver Mercury with heated seats.
Mom wants whatever Dad wants. We’re on the phone,
and I’m scrubbing the kitchen floor with my headset
on, scratching at the black sap marks that stick and
spread before finally letting go. We’re all tired of talking.
So I don’t ask them about moving closer to their kids;
I don’t mention the nurse they fired; I don’t say I think
they’re making a mistake. I breathe hard and tackle
a tough wad of sap. They tell me how cold it is in Las Vegas
in the winter; how the mountains turn purple in their rise
toward the sky. I don’t ask them if they’re eating. I keep
myself from mentioning their many medications. They
want me to love them; they want me to leave them alone.
They want to fumble along the walls of their stucco
house until one falls down, cheek to the cool tile
of the floor, bones so heavy, joints stiff, life blood
thick and unwilling. I hope the other one will lie down too,
pull an afghan over them, the one with squares her mother
made. I hope in the accumulating heat of the desert
they will gasp into each other’s arms and give themselves
away. I hope they can do it without breaking. I hope
they can do it in the clean sweet heat of the day, an open
mouthed entry, the last ripe fruits of breath released.

–from Rattle #28, Winter 2007
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

Hayden Saunier
Doylestown, PA
for
“The One and the Other”

For the first time in 2011 the Rattle Poetry Prize winner was selected from 15 finalists by subscriber vote.  To prevent ballot-stuffing, only those with subscriptions prior to the announcement of the finalists were eligible.  Of roughly 3,000 possible voters, 680 cast ballots, and Saunier’s poem earned 14.4%.   Here is what some of those readers had to say about their choice:

“In one sparse page, Hayden Saunier has let three nameless, wordless, ordinary people stir up in the rest of us a tart chaos of generosity, cheer, despair, shock, regret, and respect. I am deeply impressed by the skill with which she did that.”
–Anne Ward Jamieson

“I choose ‘The One and the Other’ by Hayden Saunier because of its telling details, its form (in contrast to the awful, out-of-order scene the child finds), its use of sound, including the irregular rhymes, and the fact it is one sentence, cascading downward to that placement of the cake. This is a poem that stays with me.”
–Mary Makofske

“It was a difficult choice, but ultimately the images of the boy with his lemon-glazed cake and the woman hanging from her chandelier refuse to leave me alone. The (relentless) repetition of the phrase ‘too late’ adds to the urgency/tragedy, and details like the boy ‘on tiptoes, avoiding the cracks’, are heartbreaking.”
–Sudasi Clement

“I vote for Hayden Saunier. What an ending! Wonderful that you guys have a prize like this.”
–Chase Twichell

“You know a poem is a winner when it makes you read and re-read it again and again and each time, you say ‘wow’!”
–Lynne Thompson

To read the poem, pick up a copy of Rattle #36, or wait to read it in our free supplemental e-issue this spring (e.12).  We’ll be reprinting the winning poem, along with our summary of the contest, our thoughts on the format and results, and more commentary from the voting subscribers.

Saunier’s “The One and the Other” was the clear winner, but all 15 of the finalist poems received a significant number of votes, and each had their own enthusiastic fans.  No one received less than 4.5% — 1 in 23 readers would have selected any of the poems a winner.  That’s a testament to both the subjective nature of poetic experience, and the quality of all 15 finalists.  Thanks again to each of them: Pia Aliperti, Tony Barnstone, Kim Dower, Courtney Kampa, M, Andrew Nurkin, Charlotte Pence, Laura Read, Diane Seuss, Craig van Rooyen, Bryan Walpert, Anna Lowe Weber, Jeff Vande Zande, and Maya Jewell Zeller.

More on all of this in the spring e-issue next month.

WHEN WE MOVE AWAY FROM HERE, YOU’LL SEE
A CLEAN SQUARE OF PAPER WHERE HIS PICTURE HUNG

The oldest living cartoon character is the word “popeye.” A cartoon character works this way: it is written so many times, with minor variations, that it appears to walk, to cast a shadow, to eat green leaves. Here are the known facts:

His pants are not white, they are empty. His face is not white, it is empty. His arms are not white, they are empty. When we say “pants, face, arms” what we mean is “where the ink ends and the rest of him begins,” or, “the him that the ink contains.”

His parts are letters. Letters make up his mind, and also emerge from it. And the point where a needle touches his thought bubble to burst it is a letter also.

When he fights his number-one enemy, he undergoes a transformation: he smiles hugely, his teeth turn to rows of movable type, and then rearrange themselves to form an ultimate insult. The enemy then begins to cry, and “popeye” is the winner.

He does not eat, exactly, but the existence of bite-marks in pen-andink apples is enough to keep him from going hungry. “Grainy,” he often complains.

When he develops goosebumps, when he forms a knot on the head, when his legs fly apart and form a fast-moving cloud, his line suffers. When his line suffers, it is said that he is “in pain.” Whenever he is “in pain,” a doctor appears and injects him with a straight line, and he sighs with relief.

Much as gold injections are used to treat lions with arthritis.

He has never worn a mustache, because he is not capable of growing a mustache. This is because he lacks both the letters M and W.

What does “popeye” mean? The doctor swabs the inside of his cheek and smears it on a slide, and looks and looks and looks.

He wakes one morning with amnesia, and when one doctor asks his name, and another doctor asks if he knows where he is, he will only say slowly, “My name is ‘popeye,’ I have no other English.”

“Popeye”: An Outline

1. Opening: First draw him a mouth, to ask “who, what, when, where, why, and how?” Then fill the mouth with ink.
2. The Body: Think of your paper as a pan of milk. A pan of milk will form a skin.
3. Closing: There is a small gap between where the arm of “popeye” ends and the fist of him begins. Please join them with your pen.

Eyebrows are his most expressive feature. He himself, straightened, is someone’s eyebrow.

In moments of grave danger, his bicep turns transparent, and reveals a sizable ink-clot, with small rivers of ink streaming away from it to form his outline, day after day, year after year. This is to reassure his viewers, who continually fear his death.

“Popeye,” in his adolescence, goes through a period of floating off the page. His father sits him down and recommends an anchor tattoo. Although he is “drawn,” and although he is “a place,” he is not a map. If anything, he is a “cartouche”: the area of a map that encloses information about the map itself.

He is often captured and sentenced to slave labor, always the same: to row oars in other moving words, and be whipped within an inch by ascenders and descenders.

Watching him works this way: he walks the length of your vision until he reaches the end. You gulp like a gangplank and he falls into the drink.

Or:             He disappears into the sunset, riding a little killie over and under the waves.

Or:             His enormous boyfriend is named Perspective; he ties him to train tracks again and again.

Any piece of paper on which “popeye” is printed counts as a Will, as it contains his signature, his witness, proof of his death, a list of all the property he owns, and the name of his inheritor.

Occasionally a schoolgirl will write “popeye” over and over with a pink pen, and it is then that he wears a dress and pretends to be a lady.

Depending on the decade, draw seams up the backs of his legs.

Parts of his body exist only when he is looking at them. He uses his shoeshine to stare up his own skirt.

At the school dance, “popeye” feels a pang in his belly and an urge to push. “Why me?” he wonders. “Why now?” Alone, he disappears through the door marked & and does what he must do.

When he is angry, a frizz of black ink appears above his head. No, forgive me. That is not ink at all. That is the least favorite hair of the typesetter, the one that emerges from the thought of his mother.

The Ongoing Crimes of His Mother and Father

His mother reaches out, hatches ink under him, and commands him to stand and walk.

His father bursts into the room, screaming, “What is the meaning? What is the meaning of this?”

His mother rushes to explain, and feels the pain of a strikethrough fly through her.

“Popeye” famously wets himself—the worst mistake a young image can make.

His father lifts a ruler, brings it down hard on his “boy,” lifts a paint-stirrer up again.

“Popeye” is an extension of the human arm. When driving horses, lift and crack him until your horses break into a black streak. Then set him upright in the whip socket again.

He is famous for being always on time; he arrives at his destination in one second flat.* In one minute flat. In one hour flat.**

*How? We suspect that he lives in an atlas, where all distances are collapsible.

**“Flat” is not the word. Say instead, there is a limited amount of him, like water, and it seeks its level.

Is he “made of paper”? No, he is papered like a hallway. Is he “made of  ink”? No, he is a ghost who had ink thrown on him during a fight, and as a consequence is now visible.

Regarding ink, why black? Black because something was extinguished there?

When rain falls on him, it falls in interruptions, incompletes, brokenoffs and bitten-backs—it is true to its typographical nature and never touches the ground.

Every second Sunday, his mother combs kerosene through his hair. The lice that live on books are not the same as the lice that live on scalps, and “popeye” has them both.

Occasionally he is left unfinished—that is, winter comes and snows in the page while his mother still has three fingers left to knit.

A poster called “Phases of the Moon” is tacked on the schoolroom wall. It shows his face in shadow, half in shadow; in light, half in light.

Page by page the “popeye” calendar is torn away. Page by page he is sent through the shredder, and finds himself in long days like the year.

“Popeye” goes hunting and brings down a 12-pointer. He drags the body to a clearing. “Thought bubble, thought bubble,” he says meditatively, and eats the lungs.

Were you a carnivore before you saw him? You are a carnivore now. He is served in slices. He is served bone-in and skin-on.

While he sleeps, “popeye” dreams of being eaten by the lion, the tiger, the leopard, the jaguar. All the roaring cats appear to him, and he dreams of being spoken backward through their strong black lips.

And being reborn on their backs as: a pattern on a solid-color coat.

And being shot, skinned, and laid out on a library floor. And his mouth forced open to seem always to be speaking.

“Popeye” stars in a revival of A Sensation Novel. He stands on a bare stage and delivers everyone’s lines. Between acts, all-in-black move back and forth and break down the scenery behind him.

The purpose of a shadow is: to put “popeye” where he is not. Shadowed he stands, like a stencil letter, always next to himself.

His protruding “pop-eye” is a world-ending button. When its dark outline disappears, you will know that the button is being pressed.

His other eye a crow walked closed.

“Popeye” loves all literature; he keeps hens for their scratchings and chickens for their prints.

One flipbook depicts him walking out to his garden and watering his own buried body until a white cabbage grows from him and prettily presents its outer leaves. This book is perpetual, and flips back and forth continually.

This flipbook is so thick that even the strongman cannot tear it. Instead, he tears a phonebook filled only with the names of “popeye” and his descendants, and the page numbers that are their addresses.

(Of sick numbers, it is said, “Number one is: number one on the list for a transplant; number two is: number two on the list.” The first and oldest “popeye” waits for his living donor to appear, and takes comfort in the knowledge that there is no death in his phonebook, and there are no unlistings.

Picture his impossible funeral: hundreds of him, laid out in the little coffins of the prepositions: under under, over over. In in.)

So many mouths to feed! In a permanent kitchen, in a permanent corner, he stretches a single meal as far as it will go. Slices and slices a transparent pie.

After supper, he sits on the porch with a long black shotgun and waits for a buffalo to wander into view. He uses every part of the buffalo— he uses them down to their eyewhites, he uses the very lines that
make them up.

He walks to the city to be counted in the census. A wind gets itself up and ruffles him relentlessly, but miniature monuments hold him down.

His paper is usually neatly stacked, especially when still in original trees.

Lives where? In voices: hills and valleys. Lives all in the alphabet as if it were a rowhouse. Lives at the peak of the tallest chalk hill.

Or lives: nowhere at all. He wanders the desert, written on old skins, moaning, “Where is home, where is home?” And waits for a tent peg to be driven through his skull.

He walks to the edge of his very country, he walks forward till he fills his profile completely, he walks into the water of Marblehead.

“Popeye” sits on the riverbank and sends himself sailing into the water: he is a good graphite rod with a strong fly line; he sings away from his reel.

His occasional girlfriend, doodled in the margins, cannot have intercourse with him; she suffers badly from vestibulitis.

A disorder of her entrance.

She faints every time he tries. “Popeye” reads the dictionary out loud to revive her. He reads, “Syncope is: a blackout, a loss of consciousness. Syncope is: the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of
a word.”

While her eyes are closed, he must suppress the temptation to spread her out and pin her like a map through a single place. For her skirt is cut to here, her blouse is cut to there!

Notes on His Movement

He is photographed in the still old style, wearing a shirt patterned with white cartwheels.

His pants patterned with instructions for a two-step.

The old music players have a strong solid base like the base of a statue, and a flowering-out above. A statue of “popeye” rises in the center of the song that is playing:

Popeye the man is no longer standing!
Popeye the man has been killed in the stomach;
his French horn spills out and out!

“Popeye” drops from the sky. The townspeople gather to watch him fall and wait to see his imprint in the pavement, but he reaches out at the last moment and grabs a branch—of what?—of the clock tower. He is suspended there still, hanging off the hour hand.

Or:

In a town with no clock tower, “popeye” falls from a great height and his thigh-bones are driven up into his body, click, like the first length of lead in a mechanical pencil.

Or:

Past, present, and future: “popeye” falls in a painting. In the foreground, a farmer pays no attention, and binds bales of newspapers in a field. “Popeye” will limp to him later, and ask to be splinted with rolled-up
dailies.

(A broken leg is often fatal for a “popeye”;
one blank to the temple will take him out.)

If the dailies succeed in prolonging him, he will heal into a new configuration: his body will bend and twist and seize; he will become a living monk’s cramp.

“Popeye” is the priest, and you must confess to him. There is a black grate where his face should be.

What does he worship—the Cross or the Clean Line? The churches here have lines for the pews to sit in, and the Bible here is Dürer’s hare.

And who is his higher power? From time to time, he feels the glass hover above him, feels magnified, feels “read,” and feels it move away.

Believes he walks on a beach, but above him, a lens is ground and ground.

And what was broken open to reveal him? In his world, all visible things stand up on the half-shell.

Correction: “I do not live in a world at all,” “popeye” says indignantly, and tightens the equator around his waist.

And does he fear death? He dreams he is a brand that sits in the fire forever.

It is impossible to know when he was born. A fragment dating from 500 BC refers to him; the title is translated as “Popeye Wavers a Little in the Heat,” or alternately, “Popeye Lives in a Hell of Line Boil.” Many have attempted to translate:

A pencil ship is difficult to wreck, but “popeye”
manages every time. The sun shines directly
above him, he floats on a raft of reflection all
the way to shore. He is caught. Cannibals
carry him home on a pole, and cannibals
cook him alive in worst-hot sketch-water.
              He lives in every mouth now,
              he cannot call himself his own!

Or:

A ship drawn only with parallel lines will never
reach its destination, and will sink if it sinks
only straight down. “Popeye” sails for the horizon
because it is all he can see: he lacks the vertical
stroke I. He sails and he sails, tied to the mast,
              the ocean boiling over below him,
              feeling his own head turn to a ham,
              feeling slices turn over one by one.

A long book of him is called a “brick,” and a long book of him is called a “doorstop.”

When it came time to put these pages in order, I laid them all out on the floor, creating the appearance of a city of rooftops seen from above. And “popeye,” who lived there, had climbed to each one.

And lay on his back reading “The Myth of the Bookcover.”

And stood up like a writing tendon, and said, “Why did you leave the book open? Anyone could have walked in.”

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Pushcart Prize Nominee

SHE RINGS LIKE A BELL THROUGH THE NIGHT

Yesterday my husband bought a Lincoln Town Car.
As we were driving to pick it up he said how it was once
the longest car in America. Sometimes I don’t have to imagine
what he’ll be like when he’s old. I can see,
clearly, tonight, the moon.

                                                      To the moon and back
is how I love you, I said, and what I say now
to my month-old daughter. But that’s not right;
that’s not enough. To the moon and back and back and back
when I was first getting to know my husband I lied,
told him I only wanted to be friends. I remember his eyes,
a ship through ice.

Ship-fronts scare me, and that is what I felt like pregnant—
so big and capable of so much: so much good; so much bad.
It was the bad I dwelled on. I watched videos of babies
with two heads, many legs, nothing at all for eyes.
I was sure I was ruining her, somehow, someway:
the fluffernutter, too many tuna fish sandwiches.

I thought once I gave birth I’d be relieved if she was okay.
I could sleep through the night and stop dreaming of her
sleeping in my arms, a pole for a head.

One fear replaces another. Each night now I wake
in fear that I’ve crushed her in bed. Sometimes it’s so bad
I wake the husband and the two of us, in the slight light
of the streetlight, are in there, in the king bed digging,
through pillows and sheets, looking for our baby.
Digging and digging as if our bed was the terrible ground
beneath the floorboards. We sweat, breathe heavy;
I’m crying.

The power to kill something is so strong up in me,
and so strange to be right next to the part of me
that can love something this much. It’s the sort of love
I want to tell people without children about,
as mothers and fathers once told me. But this is impossible.

And it’s impossible to think of my life before her
(as they said it would be)—to think of how it was when
I first saw my husband, how I imagined our life together
even then, even when he was someone else’s.

How quickly life can change direction. I wonder
if all couples imagine their husbands or wives old,
themselves old. I wonder if my parents had done so
when they were first married, decades before their divorce.
They couldn’t have known where their lives were going.
I wonder about the ease of a U-turn in our Lincoln Town Car.
A U-turn over the highway median: illegal. Sad.

I do not want my husband to leave me.

There are so many fears in me. When I try to fall
asleep I can hear a knocking against the headboard.
Someone is already at my door with the big, bad news.
So I sleep for a little while until the baby wakes me.
Sometimes I’m so tired when she wakes I get
so damn mad at her. Last night I set her
little screaming body on the countertop,
simple, like a set of keys. Her little hand was hitting
against the lever on the toaster. I think now it might
have looked like she was making toast. She had to hit
against something to wake me, to tell me
I was being a bad mother, selfish for wanting sleep
more than wanting to care for her, her little belly
empty as the streets (terrible when they’re empty).

The lake sits at the end of our street.
The sad boats float. One going this way, one that—
that’s how I see our marriage going sometimes.
As if our love will turn into something obligatory—
something to maintain like the lawn,
or a loosening shutter.

                                                  Something in me is loosening.
I dream each night of flying. Once, years ago,
I pranked my father, told him his house in Florida
had been hit by a storm. Pieces of his house were loosening.
I disguised my voice, made it old and cranky. The funniest part
is that he believed this voice.

Inside of me is the old fuddy-duddy I will someday be.
I feel her in there, like a pregnancy. Aren’t there so many
parts of us? Young, old, our children, parents.
Luckily, now, we have a big car—it stretches
across our driveway, ready to hold us, like a big, big hand.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Pushcart Prize Nominee

SO GAY

How gay is it
for two men
to stroke
the same dog
at the same time.

                        What if they’re both
sitting on a sofa watching
When Harry Met Sally.

How about two men watching
the same gorgeous sunset
            from the same high ridge.

                        And if a man daydreaming
on a bus ride finds his eyes when focus returns,
            quite accidently, on the crotch
                        of the man seated opposite.

How about two men riding
a bus into a gorgeous sunset
or two gorgeous men watching
a sunset in silence. How about
two men daydreaming and stroking
a gorgeous dog and the dog makes
a strange deep sound of pleasure.

What if the men are old friends.
What if they’re brothers.
What if there’s music playing.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Pushcart Prize Nominee

LOVE LETTER TO THE GULF COAST OIL SPILL

The photos taken from helicopters are really
quite beautiful: the weird orange waves, the way
it bends back like a spinal cord. It isn’t that I
am not sympathetic to the ocean, but it
touches the tips of birds, taking them from
naked to casket. I have always been attracted

to power in that way: fortressing my house
with brick fences and mines. The abusive
burn victims as boyfriends. Building a garden
all spring, only to maniacally cover it in poison
at the season’s end.

I wonder how the oil sounds when it speaks.
Perhaps quiet as a star. Perhaps sad as a
Wurlitzer. Perhaps it just wants to go home,
moans and cries for its mother. Maybe it is

not what it seems: its dark marigold is
its way of saying don’t leave me because
of who I am. And animals are dying and
the algae has crumbled up in the shape
and color of human blood. I find, within all the
salvage and darkness, that it has fingers.

I touch them lightly like I would
touch the skeleton of a person that I
once loved, frightened and hoping
this one doesn’t belong to me, but
it does.

–from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Pushcart Prize Nominee

RELIC

My son is not as enchanted with me
as he used to be. He’s begun to shrug my limbs off
snuff out my kisses, though I tell him
he’s only rubbing them in

I’m sauce-spattered as the kitchen
stove. I smell like stale wisdom and hard watermarks
My boot scuffs sound decades of stumble and somewhere
he must’ve noticed this, indecision
stuck between the teeth, self-doubt dirty dress hem

I’ve hoarded a certain memory from him
behind a stone he’s too small
to push over; a night of treason and injustice
where I caught his father
skipping bedtime story pages in haste
His dog-eared face, the stars sobbed
with my scalded boy, and all apologies
were slung from the balcony

He whimpered like a rusty swing set
as I lay in the next room, all glory and grace
a bruised-bitten tongue hid
I feigned sound and stately and maybe
this was the moment, the peak
where his tiny voice pleaded under the threshold
“Oh Mama, don’t marry Daddy. Marry me.”

I was pioneered, my summit laid claim to
He takes the view for granted now
And I squirrel away my stories for winters
like these to dangle before him.
See, boy. I never skipped a page.

–from Rattle #25, Summer 2006
2007 Neil Postman Award Honorable Mention

BREWING IN EDEN

Okay, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal
when I open the cupboard and notice
the coffee lids not quite secure. But
both lids have sidled practically off the cans,
like toddler twins scampering off their beds
on the way to mischief.

I no longer want coffee.

Rather, I no longer want
this coffee. My husband looks at me as though
I have grown a tail and patiently assures me
that the small animals I envision breaking into our cupboard
while we were away for the weekend—oh
how they had bided their time, rubbing their small paws
in anticipation—could not possibly have pried
tight lids from Costco 3 lb. coffee canisters. See, he says,
sifting through the grounds, making the coffee
even more unacceptable, there’s not a single thing
wrong with this coffee.

But at this point it has become a matter of aesthetics.

The coffee no longer pleases, and I choose
not to have any. Yes, I agree, it will be a waste to throw away
mostly full cans simply because I have let my imagination poison
my morning coffee. I don’t know how long we stand there,
me disgusted by the thought of the coffee, he disgusted
by my squeamishness.

It is the kind of battle we wage.

The Coffee Wars. The That-Milk-Is-Still-Perfectly-Good
Wars. The Do-You-Really-Need-All-Those-Lights-On
Wars. I scowl and he growls. I notice he’s chewing
his corn flakes more noisily than usual, so I rattle the morning paper,
as if shaking snakes from the newsprint. Then I inch the pages over
until they are ever-so-slightly on top of his placemat,
just barely touching his plate.

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

AND YET, ANOTHER NATURE POEM

maybe it’s me
but when sticking something
up my ass i like to know
what are the ingredients
so imagine my surprise
when flipping over the box
of preparation h and reading
that it consists of 3% shark
liver oil

it’s one thing to end up
fillet’d on some celebrity chef ’s
cooking show who screams
BAM as he orgasmically rubs
you down with rich aromatic
spices

there are worse ways to go
if you know what i mean
like being hunted down
chopped up and processed
as vital organs are wrung and
squeezed for the precious oils
coveted for the relief they provide
a baby boomer’s itchy anal orifice

so the next time you’re
on a cruise
riding the glassy surface of
a calm, romantic sea under
a full Bahaman or Mexican moon
holding your significant other’s
hand as you snuggle on deck
making one of those memories
that will give you comfort in
your old age–

at the same moment just a
few feet below the surface
like a pack of nazi submarines
waiting for the right moment
to strike
they are watching
waiting for you to fall in

don’t flatter yourself
you don’t taste good
for them it’s the practical
thing to do
ripping you apart
just means

one less asshole
in the world
to worry about

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

SONNY’S SONG

“Someday, they’re gonna write a blues
song just for fighters,” he once said.
“I’ll be for slow guitar, soft trumpet,
and a bell.”
—Sonny Liston, in King of the World by David Remnick

As a kid I carried fields on my back,
sharecropper’s black cotton, when daddy
wasn’t hoeing welts on it with a strap.
Ran away, at 13, traced mama’s
roadless map of hope, to St. Louis,
an assembly line, shoe factory,
her heart, a piece of stitched leather.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

On the streets I sold ice. I sold coal.
Slaughtered chickens under a blood-leaking
roof. But hunger is a hard habit to kick,
so I packed 200 pounds, 6 feet,
into fists and cashed their threats
in strangers’ faces for money’s meat.
By 22, same fists cuffed me
to the Missouri penitentiary, where,
gloved in the gym, Father Stevens
taught me to hurt others, legally.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

17 straight wins, then Floyd Patterson
sucked canvas at my feet, but whose champion?
No mayor handed me the gold key,
or kid’s marching school band played
when I stepped off the plane in Philly.
I was still the gorilla in the ring,
a cage, white bars of stars and stripes
made in the U.S. of A.
slow guitar, soft trumpet, and a bell

Though Geraldine, her body a silk robe,
waited at home, and James Brown
screamed “Night Train” refrains
on the gym’s stereo, pumped me
to hit the speed bag, skip rope, spar miles—
something inside quiet, before Clay,
seventh round, Miami, jabbed me still.
Thought he was all mouth, but the man’s
hands backed up his flashy lip. Now,
I’d unslave his name, call him Ali.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

The rest you know you don’t know:
did the mob, or a bad cop, tie
my arm to the white balloon of heroin
I finally rode out of Vegas-town,
or did I off myself, like an old felon.
You didn’t care if I lived,
why do you care how I died?
I’ll tell you when I see you in hell.
soft guitar, slow trumpet, and a bell

–from Rattle #26, Winter 2006
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention