Tag: farmer’s market

Two Poems by Iain Grinbergs

~ ONE ART ~ 1 Comment

Panama City Beach

I clocked into Dusty Dick’s hungover, having stained
downtown with Bud Light and Captain Morgan,
smelling like sweat and Lucky Strike, still wearing
the eyeliner from the night before at Splash Bar,
where I once tried to kiss a basketball player from
high school, the seat of my Levi’s wet from sitting
in a puddle of my gin and tonic. The beach wasn’t beautiful—
it was a means to an end, and the end kept coming,
every Spring Break another rerun, the same spent
mess, Front Beach Road nothing but neon madness,
a gusset of brake lights, trying to get to my new
food runner job where I soon dropped a seafood platter
bigger than a hammerhead’s head, even though I said,
I don’t think I can handle that. A blonde-haired waitress
was nice enough to help me collect the snow crab legs
and scallops and hush puppies and coleslaw and tartar sauce
from the dark wood floor, our hands sticky and greasy,
my saying, Sorry, sorry, so sorry, and her saying, It’s fine, fine, fine.
They fired me five minutes later, and I couldn’t get
my share of the tips because I hadn’t worked there long.
What was I to do but go to the nearest bar and sing
Kesha until my skull shook enough, then share
a Newport with an Air Force guy who turned out
to be a drag queen—her name was Spite and she came
from Tennessee. She said, People don’t like when you make
the Bible Belt glittery, and I nodded because I knew—
the back seat of my ‘92 Honda still had a few
fake nails as mementos from another night, when I told
myself not to drive and somehow made it back from
St. Andrews quite alive, then the next morning I managed
to pass an Intro to Psych test, slipping in before the professor
locked the door. She said she had lost it after no one cared
for her research on mice and moved to Key West,
and I thought, What if psych professors are actually
all crazy?, but I failed remedial algebra twice—
I was writing sad sonnets on Scantrons, then getting
sunburns on the Tilt-a-Whirl before scooping
ice cream at my new job, smelling of sour milk, playing
made-up games like Gum Ball Hockey and Banana Ball,
crying in the walk-in cooler before popping out
and saying, Welcome! Our latest flavor is pumpkin.

*

Letter from the Farmers Market

It’s when a boy, his face sticky with guava,
licks the rim of a honey jar—his eyes locked on mine,

defiant—that I think about how incredible this world is in all
its violations, like when a Pomeranian cocks its leg by

a crate of purple potatoes, someone laughing: Oh! Oh! Oh!
Sometimes, it’s endearing to ruin what was almost perfect—

a woman haggling over peaches like she’s bargaining
for more time, the air smelling like tulsi and sourdough, while a toddler streaks past

a box of Seminole squashes still furbished with earth. Adam means
formed from the ground, and I think of my own body—

the congenital rhythm that once held me, a rogue pulse burning through
my chest, a shortcut in the heart, a bypassing signal meant to wait

its turn but creating a dare, the dizziness like the soul punching up for air.
And there I am, holding a wet head of lettuce next to a wedge

of watermelon clenched in a baby’s fist, the sun stumbling across
the roof of a Cuban food truck, remembering the knock

of waking up three times on an operating table, then the farmer saying:
Hi? Hello? Will that be card or cash? The world is what it looks like.

*

Iain Grinbergs is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). His latest work is in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Rogue Agent.

Three Poems by Michael T. Young

~ ONE ART ~ 6 Comments

Birds that Migrate

I love the idea of how far they travel,
their ability to find their way over such distances
impresses those of us who tend to stay put.

And yet their noncommittal ways are unsettling.
How it seems as if they always have a bag packed
and ready to go. So, I feel a need to hold back,

to keep something of myself secret, just in case
I wake to find the other side of the bed cold
and their part of the closet clean. We never really

came to know each other, both of us long ago,
elsewhere, imagining how much better
life would be if the other were here.

*

Market

What is the price of a past I wondered
as we walked long aisles of crafts and antiques
dusted in what seemed an even more
antique light, history’s discards stacked on tables,
in stalls, beside old lamps, bowls and plates,
coins and stamps spread among clocks, cabinets,
chests, and racks of books. As we browsed
these prized marketable memories, we
nibbled Dutch cakes, cookies, brittle, and jerky.
Here we paused at a table of rings.
Rows of silver circles, knobbed and knotted
with different designs and images. My daughter
fished out one with a mushroom, reminder
of Alice coiled in smoke rings of Wonderland.
My son discovered a sleeping dragon.
I thought of the name of this old farmers market:
Green Dragon. When young and growing up
not far away, I imagined it a place of fire and danger,
and a gold burning light, the heat of a magic
that could transform anything into a shield
against different kinds of cold. In the ‘50s
it was the site of a cold war exercise called
“Operation Disaster.” Patrol planes strafed
the parking lot targeting people with fake bombs,
emergency personnel tended the fake wounded,
and a crowd of thousands gathered to see
who wouldn’t make it. But like a movie,
even the dead escaped alive. Now, among
descendants of the survivors, I sorted
through rings wanting to find something
meaningful in the heaps, something
I could see stamped there in the image
on its metal, even if I couldn’t name it. But
there was nothing that meant enough, and
we left for the long drive home, everyone else
content with what they found and carried away.
It was autumn, trees along the interstate
had turned yellow. The road climbed up
through a valley, lifting us toward the sunlight,
its gold threads cross stitched by birds flying
from tree line to tree line, until the air became
a curtain of gold and I looked up into it,
feeling myself rising into its radiance.

*

The Shapes of Loneliness

At first I think of footsteps
echoing down an alley or hallway,
a door clicking shut, maybe even
the sound of clippers snipping a bush.
Some isolated moment. But
it’s various, and even highly textured
like a scallop shell, ridges segmenting
space into discrete feelings,
separate ideas of how things
should have been before life split
into you and me, the time before
and the time after a friendship,
a marriage, a life. Now what’s left
retreats into the spiral recess
of a nautilus, so even when found
on a beach among crowds
of other shells, what can be heard
in any one of them is the distance
that can never again be traveled.

*

Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. His previous collections are The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost and Transcriptions of Daylight. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint, received the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Vox Populi.