It was a crapshoot, that year. Blown apart
by its glorious squalors: open marriages
you’d wanted as badly as your dominatrix
wanted to study performance art; primal
scream therapy down by the I-5 rest area;
boombox safety-belted into the shotgun
side of your muscle car, tripping along
Pacific Boulevard en route to your day
job. It chills your prodigal dreams: takeout
fajitas, still fizzling in their styrofoam box
on the minibar in a dim efficiency where
you no longer live, brewing hepatitis A
or worse. What don’t you understand? We
are also dying, in a sense. And in the other.
(Even our words doth flag.) I dig, my brother.
Originally published in Meridian
Like this:
Like Loading...
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. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Prairie Schooner, River Styx, North American Review, Barrow Street, Palette Poetry, Meridian, Barren Magazine, Crab Orchard Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He received Frontier Poetry’s 2017 Award for New Poets, and was a semi-finalist in the 2018 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. A valuation actuary by profession, he lives in Des Moines, Iowa.
View all posts by Todd Smith →
Todd Smith 