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.
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.
