Cousins in this prison town bloated with step
relatives and time, you and I grew cynical
and fifteen. Grandmother, slightly punctured
by forgetting, a slow leak, sank backwards
into the rumpus room couch and clucked
her tongue at obscenity, a six-story Underdog.
From her unkept garden we picked a moldy
squash. We pierced its custard-colored flesh
with the wood-stems of two Moon Travelers
laced with sawdust from the Fourth of July,
fuses twisted like thin vines. Who has not
sinned. Flecks of squash on your upturned
face. Grandmother mumbled a dinner table
grace to the deities of can-mold cranberry.
You bowed your head. Three oval seeds fell
to your plate from the loose curls of your hair.
Originally published in Sycamore Review
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About Todd Smith
Born and raised in rural west-central Illinois, Todd Smith studied poetry, music, and math at the University of Virginia, and received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, River Styx, Crazyhorse, North American Review, Barrow Street, Palette Poetry, The Massachusetts Review, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere, and have been featured on Verse Daily. He received Frontier Poetry’s 2017 Award for New Poets, and was a semi-finalist in the 2018 Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Contest. A valuation actuary by profession, he lives in West Des Moines, Iowa with his partner, poet Heather Derr-Smith; their daughter; and their two sons.
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