The Sound of Sugar....Steve Langan

THE MIDWEST

I remember this old guy at the bar

where I worked gestured toward a girl

seated with friends at a round table

and said, You really need to learn to pause,

study the small of a woman’s back,

the parallel lines subtly curving upward—

are her shoulders little shouts or whispers?—

and her neck, slightly untuned, does it plead?—

to know how best to begin to pursue her.

But I was mainly interested in scoring then,

in showing you how many bottles I could

hold aloft in the dim light, and getting

and staying loaded for days at a time.

It’s rude to talk too much about yourself.

That’s what we learn here in the Midwest.

Days are numbered, we ask you to contribute

to the bottom line, to catch one another

in your sullen reproaches, crashing swoons,

make it look easy these next squalid hours.

Some little nitpickers claim we’re improving.

But we can’t all be angels of mercy or pain,

hunting and gathering, failing and building,

saving nothing for later, sleeping it all off.

About the Poet:

Steve Langan was born in Milwaukee and raised in Omaha. He earned degrees from the University of Nebraska and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Langan is the author of Freezing (2001), Notes on Exile and Other Poems (2005), Meet Me at the Happy Bar (2009), and What It Looks Like, How It Flies (2013).

About the Sound of Sugar:
We’ve loved reading the work that we’ve published (clearly), so now we want an opportunity to better hear our contributors. We will feature an audio recording of a poem from one of our seven issues, read by the poet and updated every couple of weeks. This an open invitation to all contributors from any of our issues, we were delighted to print your work, now we’re eager to hear it.