"Where did we learn to be unkind, / There in the power of holding each egg / While watching dogs in June / Dust & heat, or when we followed / The hawk's slow, deliberate arc?" - Yusef Komunyakaa, "Sunday Afternoons"

Joe Betz is an Associate Professor of English at Ivy Tech and produces electronic music under the name Knuckled Fruit. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His first chapbook, SOOT, will be published in 2022 with Finishing Line Press.

Welcome to the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey. Joe, what poems have you brought for us today?

SOOT

I walked into the living room

the way crabs on PBS navigate themselves against rocks

so my father said stop moving and sit down.

//

Wind pulled the dried hangnails of leaves

from limbs before depositing each

into the thickening river.

//

I imagined a fan circling above our heads like confused weathervanes

though the trailer had none but the box near the kitchen window

murmuring like a new and crag-pocked heart.

//

Ribs thinning

like a promise repeated, breath,

my father’s bright cough through ash

blue teeth.

//

Twitch in the neck 

emblem of methamphetamine’s pulse:

cat’s claw hooked in the eye’s soft skin. 

//

When he told me how the weather meant fire

in a coffee can’s cup I saw two cardinals clutched

inside a tailpipe’s vice. 

//

Smoke bloomed against the ceiling as a new dark wound.

By Christmas our skin could be cleaned with a comb.

PORTAGE, INDIANA

Perfectly packaged boxes sit in the shadows of the shoe store

while a man pulls down the protective metal grating, giving me a goodnight,

the specials and discounts for men. I want to say something profound

but have my fists deep in coat pockets and can’t make the appropriate gestures.

A woman passes me bundled in scarves. I remember my mother in snow boots

black and waxed with salt and tar from the potholed road that led to our door,

the house squatting into soil dark and rich with worms I’d pull from holes

in the basement walls, frozen, not ready to be pinched by fishing hooks I cleaned

religiously as guns my father kept. She was holding a cat and crying. It thawed

in the sink like a package of pulled pork left over from October. 

Who knows where she found it. She would sometimes walk for hours. 

RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD

On corn tassels, dew. On our jeans, dew.

From his lips a boy wipes sweat thick

as pickling salt. Today no one is resting,

not even the sun high and burning like

a cross in misanthropic minds. On the radio,

love. On our minds, love. In the field

we’re slipping wet hands in corn until we

walk slow as clouds plumping west to the

farmer asleep in his truck, rocks and lunch

boxes behind our burnt backs red as apples

now cooling to peel. No one is resting.

Our plan to bang these rocks, whip these

boxes for wild music, we slink. We are

children; mustard weed on pant legs.

And in fifteen feet, we will later say we knew

an engine’s backfire did not ring but popped

to nothing, and in fifteen feet, we will

later say the sound was not the tractor’s

basket clipping another well. We are children.

We smell him first. And in the early afternoon,

if you watch, a red-winged blackbird will

sit on a phone line for you silent

as waving hands, a plane in the sky.

You've been listening to the poetry of Joe Betz on the Poets Weave. I'm Romayne Rubinas Dorsey.