Both foreign and familiar
you patrol the hidden
America.

You don’t care about
selling the most
cookies.

You know how
to tell a joke but you don’t
want to.

You’ve learned to be
suspicious
learned to be always
on the lookout.

You’ve heard the stories
from the battlefields—
academic, financial, political

and yet you refuse
to run away and join
the circus even though
relationships create
obligations,

so you walk
in perpetual Lent
concentrating ashy guilt and
polishing it to a
rough luster

for you need things
to be raw &
heavy
and irritating
to the eye.

Tom D’Angelo works in the Writing Center at Nassau Community College in Garden City, NY, and teaches courses in Mythology, Film and Literature, and Creative Writing. In addition to poetry, his current projects include a series of creative non-fiction essays on his formative years in Queens, NY. His poems have most recently appeared in The Flatbush Review.