IT'S THE QUICK PRICKS

by Tricia Knoll

You lament we’ve missed so much

theater, solstice estivals, state fair curly fries,

Aunt Moo’s 75th birthday at the river

 

but I’m thinking of what I don’t miss

    yellow fever       polio       lockjaw

          flu         hepatitis       diphtheria 

 

because I learned a thing or two

     from   mumps     measles    chicken pox

                whooping cough

 

see I’m old enough to have had those

      but not the firsts because I got the shot

 

and I’m old enough to have had

       my two COVID quick pricks

 

so I don’t miss holding my new grandson

       on the way, seeing our plays unfold

       on a stage with open curtains. 

       Amen and thank you.  

Tricia Knoll just got her second COVID shot. She took the "quick pricks" from Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Dear Vaccine." Knoll's new chapbook Checkered Mates is available from Kelsay Books and Amazon.

DUNKING

Editor's Note: We are pleased to repost this poem, originally published in TheNewVerse.News on Thursday,March 19, 2015. It is one of our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees.

DUNKING
by Richard Spilman

Back when you were fourteen, small
and new to that school, three toughs
cornered you in the boys’ john, shoved
your head into a bowl of yellow water,
and when they let you up you screamed
bloody murder, hit anything your arms
could reach. To shut you up, the big one
put his foot on your neck and told you
what they’d do. You believed and cried.
Hands in pockets they left one by one
Silently, as if they’d watched a man
betray his friends for a moment of breath.
You dried off, picked up your books,
and went to class. You didn’t tell, and
the teachers didn’t ask about you wet shirt,
and the kids already knew your disgrace.

That was the last time you ever cried.
Not when you were wounded in war,
not when your wife left telling you
she couldn’t love a man so closed off.
You make money trading commodities.
You don’t buy and sell goods, you buy
and sell futures—someone always wins,
someone loses, roulette with wheat and gold.
You trade in illusions, in rises and falls
on a screen created by phantom sales.
Investors like fish rise to your bait.
At the reunions you bring your latest,
her blonde youth a testament to your
prowess, but they laugh behind your back.
For them, your collar is forever yellowed
with piss, your eyes rimmed with tears.


Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He lives in Hurricane WV where he is discovering that a bathroom above a garage makes for a frigid winter.

DUNKING

by Richard Spilman

Back when you were fourteen, small
and new to that school, three toughs
cornered you in the boys’ john, shoved
your head into a bowl of yellow water,
and when they let you up you screamed
bloody murder, hit anything your arms
could reach. To shut you up, the big one
put his foot on your neck and told you
what they’d do. You believed and cried.
Hands in pockets they left one by one
Silently, as if they’d watched a man
betray his friends for a moment of breath.
You dried off, picked up your books,
and went to class. You didn’t tell, and
the teachers didn’t ask about you wet shirt,
and the kids already knew your disgrace.

That was the last time you ever cried.
Not when you were wounded in war,
not when your wife left telling you
she couldn’t love a man so closed off.
You make money trading commodities.
You don’t buy and sell goods, you buy
and sell futures—someone always wins,
someone loses, roulette with wheat and gold.
You trade in illusions, in rises and falls
on a screen created by phantom sales.
Investors like fish rise to your bait.
At the reunions you bring your latest,
her blonde youth a testament to your
prowess, but they laugh behind your back.
For them, your collar is forever yellowed
with piss, your eyes rimmed with tears.


Richard Spilman is the author of In the Night Speaking and Suspension. He lives in Hurricane WV where he is discovering that a bathroom above a garage makes for a frigid winter.

THE REUNION OF THE PUSSY RIOT SINGERS

by Tricia Knoll 

One of the two recently released members of Russian punk protest band Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, said on Friday that their release was aimed solely at improving Russia's image before it hosts the Winter Olympic Games rather than a humanitarian gesture. --Mail & Guardian, December 29, 2013

May the games begin
the announcer calls
and may the best man,
oops and best women
carry the gold

for a nation waiting
for its glory count,
so speaks the media.
An embarrassment
of riches -- each nation

locks away those who speak
with the timber voice
of righteousness and pussies.
Amnesty is the tool
not of enlightenment
but of international spotlight.

Were the games to witness
to the strong
to commit peace
with unlike others,
with the soil we walk,
air we breathe,
and the creatures
who out-run us, out-sing us,
out-fly us, and out-think
us under the waters.
Were these the games,
a turning revolution,
victors might repair
the spoils.


Tricia Knoll is a Portland, Oregon poet who for decades has imagined winning the women's Olympic marathon while slowly jogging through an urban landscape. Her chapbook Urban Wild will be published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press.