11-3-2025

 

Seth Brady Tucker

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SOLACE                                                                                          

 

A man parks his truck sideways

            on the top of the structure, kids

            spill out on skateboards, the man

            is a father & these children scream

            in delight & another man looks up

            from his warm beer, searching; the sun

            is sideways across the water & a crimson duck

            flitters across the bright skyline & disappears

            & Trump is still President & there are so many guns

            & they outnumber us all & somewhere a child

            is in a cellar just as Ursula K. Le Guin warned us

            they would be—& that we must know this child’s

            suffering to know joy—but this father & his raucous

            children are oblivious & loving & loved & wild in play

            & his over-worked knees grind as he watches

            the kids speed down the oiled concrete ramps,

            rough hands on pipe he laid, skateboards skirting

            danger & taking whooping risks along the shaded

            spiraling levels down & down, & he helped build

            these ramps & poured the shell & his truck shines

            & spills bright tin music & it is enough to know

            that this man & his children all exist no matter

            what this country will do to them & I am alone

            behind glass, high in my rarified white air & below

            me the man limps quickly down the concrete

            ramp when there is a sharp cry from the dark

            & I press my face against the cold glass & listen

            & pray that the child will emerge unscathed

            & unhurt & ready to trust that the love

            that is trembled through the father’s hands

                                                                 is enough to save us.

 

TO CROP, TO THRESH

 

Alfalfa & cloves & the smell of cinnamon

coat your skin like fur, the sweat new as sad rain,

the sweet condensation of the canvas water bag far off

& hung on the cattle-truck. Nearby, steers complain in their pen.

Your work is a panic

to keep up; the orbit

of hay bales are a form

of forever that your father

shoulders easily to his neck.

                                            Wyoming

burns away everything but the chaff. You stumble under the bales.

You buck them up from knees with two hands curved into hooks,

& each punch into the wet meat of the bales is like a punishment

& this is how to learn the suffering that makes a man, & the hole

that finally rips away from the hay is a ball of rattlesnakes; the bale

is the planet you heft; the boil of baby snakes is a deadly moon;

& your father has a bale across his thighs, boots careless

as they twist & crush the curling children of our eternal sins.

 

These babies, you think,

 

born toothless

& without the voice

 

that would call down

their necessary gods.

 

NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH                                          

 

The poisoned elm dies

with a whimper of leaves;

like applause amid the thrumming

of insect wings, like a dirge made of arachnid song; stiff

thorax & mandible squeals sounded down in wooden

circulations of sapped deciduous blood.

 

                                                         An empty bottle

of Roundup™ lies in the ground cover like a handgun found in a lake.

 

In the fall you will rock the trunk back & forth until

you hear the satisfying sound of joints dislocating,

feel the splinter of wooden bones shattering

along the length of the trunk. You should know—

this is timepiece, just like your history—nature broken

apart by chemical hammers, roots cracked

from the abdomen or fronds adorned

with the bloom of a gun.

 

                                  Leaves spasm in suffering. They feel.

This last circadian witness to the rise & fall of a community.

 

                                  Another of our failures:

the fall of leaf & branch

& bough, un-made in the image

of the man across the street, bare-chested,

slow mist of the dying world spurting from the yellow

vessel he pumps, another gun. He signals an end of days

for whomever it was who thought

 

to lovingly plant this elm here in the first place,

                      something

                                          anything

                                                              everything

to watch over everyone

who chose to stay so far behind.

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-from The Cruelty Virtues, celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

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Seth Brady Tucker is executive director of the Longleaf Writers’ Conference and he teaches creative writing at the Lighthouse Writers' Workshop and at the Colorado School of Mines near Denver. He is  senior prose editor for the Tupelo Quarterly Review, is originally from Wyoming, and once served as an Army Paratrooper with the 82ndAirborne in Iraq. He is a multi-genre writer and his work recently appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Driftwood, Copper Nickel, Birmingham Poetry Review, and others.