a new poem written while transcribing old poems

we write poems about other things than poverty and whiskey, just not this one

There are new poems to be written

Without references to evening glasses of whiskey

Or memories of rusted train cars

And the dirt that cakes underneath untrimmed toenails

Clean new poems about doing laundry

Watering gardenings and hammering nails

into cold frames for spinach in February.

The neighbor’s pitched roof

Instead of flat roofed shotgun row houses

and a tree growing up through the basement.

We won’t mention in these poems

Frozen fingertips and ice frozen on brown tarps

Sleeping through a railroad crew change in Havre, Montana.

Wanting nothing more than a hot shot of whiskey

and a juniper twig of a cigarette rolled without the cover of cotton gloves.

Bright poems about house plants

Walking their way around hallway corners

prayer flags getting tossed in forty mile an hour gusts

A new used pickup truck in the driveway

Silver like the tracks of the Burlington Northern through Abo Canyon

East of Belen and south of Albuquerque and a quiet sobriety