09-01-2025
J Bruce Fuller
HOW TO DROWN A BOY
Not with water, but with sweat,
you work the boy until he cries.
At the barn faucet, think of your own father,
cup your hands and tell the boy
to look deep inside this well,
make him drink from your hands,
make him drink until he swells, make
him taste the salt and split nails,
cracked knuckles, bone and blood.
Tell him this blood is the life I have given,
this blood the covenant, that you must always
measure your life against mine.
Now sneak him the whiskey
behind the shed where his mother can’t see,
show him that this is what a man has earned,
and just a taste because he’s only a boy,
with too much of his mother in him.
A sip more and he will learn.
And if the sharpness of the still
leaves him weak, or the swing of the hammer
wears him out, and if he squirms
at the trigger pull to give the doe a chance to flee,
then walk the boy down to the river
and baptize him there with your own two hands.
THE GIFT AT DIRIDON STATION
And I met a man once at Diridon Station
who asked me for a cigarette and I seen
he was a traveler and I seen he had been lost.
And I give him one but won’t let him pay.
He offers twice but I won’t let him pay.
And I heard in his voice the voice of home
and I seen in his face the face of my father.
So I asked him where he was from
and he said long ways off thousand miles east
and I said me too and I said whereabouts
and he said Kentucky and I said Louisiana
and we smoked together and talked ourselves
back home for a while.
And he told me what he seen of the world.
And he told me he ain’t seen much
of what it says in the Good Book.
And I told him I met good people
who ain’t never even heard of Jesus.
And I told him I met a woman who prayed
kneeling on grains of rice for hours
until she couldn’t walk and her husband
come home and beat her for not having
supper ready. We all His children they say.
And they say Jesus did miracles at Cana
in Galilee but I was taught to fear the wine
and reminded with a heavy hand.
And they say when you have a houseguest
treat him like family cause he might be Jesus
come to test us. And I think about Jesus
knocking on the door asking.
As I left I wished him luck on his journey
and as I was walking off he called to me.
Him pulling around in his pack for payment
and me knowing better than to refuse him again.
And he pulls out a double-bladed Barlow knife
bent and mangled and stainless steel
and been lord-knows-where. And he holds
it out in his hand like a sacrament
and I take it from his hand like it’s the Lord’s
own flesh. I say it’s too much and he might need it
and he says naw I got a hundred of em
and I know he don’t
but we both know this ritual and anyways
a man can’t be beholden to another man
like it says in the Book.
REMEMBERING MY FATHER WHO WENT OFF TO WORK
I think of my father, gone
for months, and the places
he went for work,
and though he said nothing much
upon returning, the wonders
our mother would tell us
about the places he went,
and realize that there wasn’t
much to tell of his trips,
each place much the same
to a pipefitter, building
Wal-Marts in small towns
the same as ours, pipelines
that looked the same except
for maybe a difference
in temperature or elevation,
but sometimes, how he would
describe a bird we’d never seen,
or snow, as strange to us
as the moon, or sometimes,
that far-off look he’d get,
what I now understand to mean.
I know now what you left there, Papa,
tobacco spit on churned earth,
right-of-ways that stretch
as far as a man’s mind can stand,
until it breaks, and you heave
out your guts and beer
in an abandoned mall parking lot,
working shutdowns until every
refinery looks the same
and you lose your way
in the crawlspaces that stretch
beneath entire rivers,
the way mountains make you feel
small at first then less
until you pray for a flat,
clear horizon to show you
the way home, the faces
of your sons you’ve forgotten
a thousand times in a bar
in Topeka, or Amarillo, or Jackson,
so when the local girl
with a thing for roughnecks
sidles up, you see in her face
the faces you miss and you reach
out for the life you left behind.
-from HOW TO DROWN A BOY celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
J. Bruce Fuller is the author of How to Drown a Boy (LSU Press, 2024). His chapbooks include The Dissenter's Ground, Lancelot, and Flood, and his poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Best New Poets 2022, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University, where he is Director of Texas review Press.
