The crape myrtle & how it got there.
It’s blooming seemed to take forever.
Keep an eye on every crack
in the sidewalk. The rosemary
has grown enormous. One might grind
a sprig under one’s sneaker; later it laces
the common room’s stale afternoon air.
Your other eye is, of course,
focused on a Godforsaken prize.
You’ll break your mother’s back & then some.
See how awfully she wants to go home?
She envies you the ratty sneakers,
how just now you seemed capable of anything.
JOHN HOPPENTHALER’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). Professor of CW and Literature at East Carolina University, he serves on the Advisory Board for Backbone Press, specializing in the publication and promotion of marginalized voices. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks.