I wrote this poem maybe 12 years ago. At the time I was in a poetry group. They all had problems with it, which is another way of saying they didn’t like the poem. They didn’t like any of my poems except for one. There was one poet in the group, an aggressive, self-righteous feminist who enjoyed fighting with me about poetry, an art she was trying to learn, coming from prose. Her brother thought I was sleezy. Imagine that. All my life I’ve tried as hard as I can to be sleezy and yet I was a little offended. A while after the group had taken the poem apart it was accepted for publication by a tiny journal in Wisconsin called Nerve Bundle Review, the love-labour of a man named Dan Nielsen. He took one other poem of mine and was a fan of Specimen Tank, before giving up on the literary life and disappearing. The group thought it was funny that the poem they had savaged was published. But that’s the way it always goes with groups.The only group that ever did anything for me as a writer was the group of Old Ladies I worked with for a few years. They were tough and beautiful and there wasn’t an outsized ego in the room other than mine. Two years with them tamed it into shape, that and a decade and a half of rejection letters.

Home

Watching the rain beat snow into black puddles

New grass starting in the dirtied stalks of old

Garage junk and tree limbs shrunk and bent

In the water beaded glass you pull from the sink

Wash and hand me, an angry solitary bird

Descends and pecks, strutting through the bronze