Rose Poto

Brockton Man

           In newsprint gray, a friendly face
greets me from the Local section:
bearded, young, with just a trace
of resignation

           tugging at one brow, the eyes
meeting mine — but no, not quite,
they’re fixed on something just beyond,
at earring height.

           He’s cut his hair, I see. Looks good.
And from a glimpse of neck I know
the rest: the veiny arms he had
ten years ago

           still white-hot, rivered with blue,
the tender skin, still prone to burn.
A headline calls the youth I knew
Brockton Man,

           as if he were some ancient skull,
perhaps not human, scientists
dug up. But modern man can kill
with his bare fists,

          and knives are only sharpened stones.
Excuses, too, are nature’s law.
He stabbed her more than twenty times;
her children saw;

           but that was the drugs, my heart contends,
and if I feel a twinge of lust
remembering those tapered bands
of muscle, just

           or unjust doesn’t enter in,
nor grief for someone I don’t miss
and never having known, can’t mourn.
Only this,

           of all instincts, best and worst:
to bond, to bend, to waive, to waver,
to put unruly feelings first,
and gloss it over.

Laissez-faire

“[The overpopulation of Ireland] being altogether
beyond the power of man, the cure has been applied
by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence...”
— Charles Trevelyan, British Treasury Secretary, 1846

The extra folk. The fat. The gristle.
Ragweed, nettle, buckthorn, thistle.
Girls in shirtwaist factories.
Brushwood burned to free the trees.
Dusty little Mom-and-Pops.
Apple peelings, turnip tops.
The latchkey kid, the lemon rind,
the poor New Orleans left behind.
The trampled ant, the straying sheep,
the badly schooled, the compost heap
that must decay to feed the crop.
John Henry’s carcass, should he drop;
his life, his living, should he live.
The damn we frankly do not give.
The sack in which we drown the whelp
(as Nature sometimes needs our help).

Companion Piece

At first it surprised me to hear that these two pieces would appear side by side in a themed issue; they seemed so dissimilar. They have several things in common, though, one being that they’re more about people than poetry. One’s mostly narrative, the other satire; neither is surreal or cloaked in metaphor. Both push the boundaries of my definition of poetry. Are straightforward musings about moral issues allowed in poetry? Increasingly I find myself wanting to use the word “verse” instead of “poetry,” as A. E. Stallings suggests in her essay, “Crooked Roads Without Improvement: Some Thoughts on Formal Verse.” I like the word “verse.” It’s freeing. If I aspire to be an artist, art always has to come first. If I’m just a humble versifier, I’m allowed to have something to say.