Return From The Void

After a brief...two year hiatus...I'm going to restart posting on this blog.  Here you will find poems, musings about poetry, about writing, and about teaching.  If you want to read about some of my travels over the last few years, check out my travel blog.

This poem was written in response to a prompt I found over at Poetic Asides, a blog operated by my old friend (and college literary rival) Robert Lee Brewer.

The Silly and The Serious

As a child I ate ants on the school yard.
I remember them as lemony, a small

burst of not-quite-sweet as my teeth
tore through the carapace.  Molly

Stinson called me “bug-eater”.  Years
later, I kissed her behind the rectory,

with the same mouth in which perished
an uncounted, many-legged herd.

I never ate earth, though I knew a girl
who did, beneath her parents’ porch,

spoon upon spoon of brilliant red
clay.  Her name was also Molly.

My mother has a picture of me
chewing on a stick, but that was

in the pre-ant years, when I wore
that brown and white striped shirt,

and my father was still around,
before I became the sad monster,

devourer of insects, with a mind
of Molly and my hands in the earth.