Shafer Hall
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HOW TO SURVIVE ON LAND & SEA
Evening came
With no nickels for dancing
Earlier in the day,
A public opinion poll of
Two Mexican kids revealed:
One hundred percent
Of two Mexican kids
Prefer orange Popsicles
To their big brother’s girlfriend
From which it can be inferred
That life is like a train
And we are like cheap apartments
And we shake when the train rolls by
See for yourself:
In the nickel light
A slender woman dances
And mispronounces your name
The horror:
A five-year-old girl’s
intransitive loathing
finds an object in a
blissfully ignorant
marsupial.
Let Spring
blossom, little possum,
your world is worse
than you know.
Keep your rat’s teeth clean
on the pinewood of my
fence;
let the shadow that
you cast
on my bedroom wall be
large.
Sunflowers are monsters
to the mice in the
field.
“Roy Orbison’s sublime,”
say Nick’s four-year
old eyes.
Nick provides
incisive commentary
(suburban decay,
middle-age paranoia)
by throwing a brick through
my uncle’s rotted
back fence.
“Nick,” I say, watching him eat,
“I had forgotten the beauty of banana”
The Doctor is in; Mike Mahoney is in. He started
at the edge of light,
and now his office is a bit like
a Midwestern jail,
both hot and cold at the same time.
Fiddling with the door, he confirms its
status: locked
like a late-evening
Super Bowl bet. The doctor is in.
On the end of the beach, fiddling with
childhood
memories, Dr. Mike Mahoney
finally remembers where,
on a hot night on
in a sense.