New York

When I lived in New York, I’d bathe in the kitchen
because that’s where the bathtub was.
Ancient history. I should keep it to myself.

Some people lead exciting lives,
and who doubts their miraculous stories
of the cave-in, the fire, the flood.

All I can tell you is of the warm bathwater
and the drowsy feel, of looking over the porcelain rim
at a frying pan I didn’t get clean.

*

Ice Water in Hell

—and don’t we
deserve it
all of us longing
for hell to freeze over
stacking life’s ingots
beside hot furnaces
at the ceaseless conveyor
of modern life
in this dark-mill place
the din of machines
thundering around us
while we wring buckets
of our precious sweat
from sopping bandanas
wearing t-shirts
with slogans that
proclaim how unrepentant
we are, will always be
and when we pull them off
sweat drips down a chest
containing a heart
beating
longing to sin again.

*

Plant

From the blacktop road
and the school bus stop,
look down the lane
between muddy pastures
and wire cow fences
to that house
where a man
who’d like to be
feeding the world
raises his hands
to plant the barrel
of a shotgun in his mouth . . .

*

David Salner’s debut novel is A Place to Hide (Apprentice House, 2021) and his fourth poetry collection is The Stillness of Certain Valleys (Broadstone Books, 2019). He worked as iron ore miner, steelworker, machinist, and now librarian. His writing has appeared in Threepenny Review and Ploughshares. Innisfree Poetry Journal 33 featured a retrospective of 25 poems drawn from his four books. https://www.innisfreepoetry.org/innisfree-33/a-closer-look-david-salner/