No Good at Sea - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael Steffen grew up in Buffalo, New York and has lived in northeastern Pennsylvania since 1987. He earned his undergraduate degree at Empire State College and his MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ellipsis, The Ledge, Iron Horse, Poet Lore and many other journals. Mr. Steffen is the recipient of a 2002 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He currently lives in Bushkill, PA and works as a software engineer for Verizon Corporation. This is his first full-length poetry collection.

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The Truth, 1961

Grass was alive with hoppers balanced on thin spears.
A sea serpent skulked in my green-watered pond,
and hawk-people hid in the woods behind us
hankering for soft flesh, especially
the guts of children.
From the patio, I saw their silhouettes
in the trees, the glint of a tooth
or a white bone cudgel,
as quiet as the gypsies Mrs. Gaul swore,
from her chaise lounge, would steal me,
the python in the garbage
that could grind me to pulp.
Tarantulas prowled the sandbox,
and still, my mother from the kitchen
insisted the fresh air would do me good.
But hiding in my room is no way to live,
so my father carried me in the backyard s
after-supper gloam to let the ants roam
over his fingers, then mine. He pointed
to the long-shadowed trees, the unhinged
seaweed in the watery light. No monsters,
no cannibals. A spider. Just a spider s
thin-legged dangle, an eyelash
in the latticed breeze; in the rippling compost,
a garter snake trenching through egg shells.