Clade Song 15

A Garage Song

You put a little bar of rat poison
on a workbench & pick up an old paperback
waterlogged with scalloped pages
& crack a beer remembering what you loved
about that alcoholic poet’s
solecistic syntax wound around

irregular sestets like a guitar string
looped through its own ball end
for a rodent snare. Lived like a rat,
tossed himself from a bridge over
fifty years ago—persona non grata
on contemporary shelves

for his idiotic minstrel voicings—
& you love this life & this can
of beer & ampersands like cockroaches,
you love coexisting in this crepuscular
hour with pests, though you cannot find
the ladder out of night.

Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn. His chapbook, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released. His writing can be found in many publications, most recently The Glacier, Potomac Review, Panoply, and North American Review. His next book, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.