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Sweet Corn

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"Are you disappointed? Let's see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won't work."
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

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?

KNUCKLE UP

 

Fists dense with nickel rolls,

two-dollar punches, we

swing heavy through new fog

built with sugar-sick breath.

Dangerous, flexing over every

reflective surface, new gods birthed 

by mistimed pullouts, we preen. Pleasure

 

is the hook dense as cold molasses

through the interstice of two ribs,

coughed.  //  These performative

combos construct Sunday, affect worlds

built of ripped linoleum skin

 

stitched and buffed on the fifteenth

of next month, 32nd of

never   //     If you miss, if

you miss, if you miss //

stuttered prophecies of retribution

hiss between laughs serious as butter

 

absent the refrigerator, as chapped

lips’ preemptive bleeding when smiles

stretch seasonal lessons regarding overindulgence  

//   sting. We watch each punch

wind up like promise,

trading false haymakers in sync,

inexhaustible, mini pumpjacks lapping oil.

 

AGAINST THE WIND

 

 

Small as deer ticks sequestered in ear hair

undiscovered through November,

as blood in dimples of wedding bands

sitting on bathroom sinks. How the wind

makes me. Coyote curling above bean hills,

alfalfa seed. Still the cardinal’s red body

held in a cat’s maw below the porch. Sunset. 

Tonight I’ll believe in good things. 

                                               

                                                Cardinals flying.

 

SWEET CORN

 

Subtle, the scent nudging past leaf

and stalk, dirt dry as knuckles washed

with gasoline, they tempted patience,

husk down flashing white

and yellow seeds, skin swelling

almost phosphorescent under sun

loud as the bullet to end a cow

turning itself in a barbwire vice.

 

//

 

I’d picked each ear heavy above my head

beading dew grasshoppers sipped

before spinning off in a buzz of legs,

my hands heavy with sleep

punch-drunk as wasps escaping Stroh’s cans

filling a basket on my back. Coyotes turned

in hollow logs near the river.

Silence punctuated each step left.

 

//

 

Later no cars would stop. The sign

on which I’d written SALE

fell over in a semi’s wake.

I dreamt of butter and salt, the good

hard plates, and counted corn snakes

writing my name across the highway.

When the farmer stopped

asking where I’d grown that corn

I felt the sun pull water from my neck,

knew my legs were faster than his mouth.

 

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

Corn on the cob

(Rob Bertholf, Wikimedia)

"Are you disappointed? Let's see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won't work."
- Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler

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.

Joe reads "Knuckle Up," "Against the Wind," and "Sweet Corn."

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