3/21/2023 0 Comments Xpressive appked![]() The high kicks of the skinheads, twirling Some rich kid from New York wrote about credit, When trying to beat back the dogs of sorrow That left red cuts on the ends of their Marlboro Reds Moved in and mowed everyone’s front yard-Īnybody ever took from them in shaved heads That were cut from the same hateful treesĪnd carry knives to school, before the Mexicans While they beat the shit out of each other ![]() The way the Willamette rips the city in half, In the park, someone buys a lottery ticket, The car idle in the parking lot, listening to the driverĪs he makes his slow way, up the stairs, toward the door. With no address, no place to go, standing by the window With grief and call a cab at four in the morning Scraping their knuckles, she was his mother. Knocking her off the stool, because she was a junkieĪnd because, his fists gnashing their teeth, his mouth The man squeezing her nipples has never been in debt.Īnd there is something about how Ian loved his mother When they thought they were still getting out of bed,Īnd there is something about how the woman is moaning,Īgainst the side of his thigh that makes me think In a tin can that denies I have ever been faithful,Īnd with the rain beating the gutters I don’t know Left on a park bench that denies I ever existed,Īnd something about a cigarette snubbed out Of course, there is something about a black scarf Unloading a shipment of stuffed animals and lampshadesĪbout industry that feels like an elevator between floors. On the sidewalk while other men stand on a dock Something about the indignity of standing To do with his father standing in line for work. That has nothing to do with empathy but everything In combat boots, a swastika inked into his neck There is something about my first fight, the chain linkĪs I doubled over into a roll of quarters and the boy Something that makes us rip our clothes off. When I look up through the palms and think of lemons. There is something about my watch, that it glowsĪnd is for children, something about a weightĪround my wrist that will never remind me of prison. People cross the street when they see you Swelling inside your chest like someone pumping It made up for in baseball bats and chain linkįences. What our neighborhood lacked in compassion But it is his artfulness and large spirit, telescoping without sentimentality the single outlook of a speaker who has escaped such conditions and now looks back, as bluesy as such projects go, that gives his poems a universality of feeling, an expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure.įor Ian Sullivan Upon Joining the South-Side White Pride His authority is that of the native, unwavering and resolute. He knows something about the sorrow of this world, its call for a kind of toughness of spirit and a sensitivity that must go underground if one is to survive and, more importantly here, the violence that such poverty recreates and echoes in the lives of the dispossessed. Matthew Dickman hails from a neighborhood called Lents, a largely white underclass suburb in Southeast Portland, Oregon. The anger of dejected youth is almost always a cliché) in art, and in mainstream culture that anger among the ruins and squalor is usually black and/or Latino. Outside the frame of these poems lurk the children of female-headed homes parents who work two or more jobs teenage moms who live in “Drug-Free Zones” and “Urban Renewal Zones,” unkempt neighborhoods whose parks are normally full of drugs teen addicts slumping toward oblivion and fathers for whom the closest thing to therapy is domestic abuse. Matthew Dickman’s melancholic portraits of impoverished white teenagers dazzle me into the always painful, yet easily forgettable, awareness that many people suffer psychically under the knife of American prosperity.
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