Photo: Michael Martin (right) with Lewis Lapham in New York.
Summer Road Trip, Incidentally
/ Michael Martin
Some states you can’t throw sand at the sea.
Some states you get a police escort into the interior
Where you answer the question and pet the dirt.
Some states kiss your eyes the right number of times
So you’ll stick around awhile.
One state is like the third inning of the first spring.
It’s like the garden section at Lowe’s—
O to be lost and beautiful and abstracted there!
Returning with the loved ones
Through parking lots of sun.
I remember a state trembling like a boy
After he’s tongued her wrong ear
And so she’s putting on her clothes
And walking home in a quake.
It’s all sort of like a life
And cools the borders.
Michael Martin’s first collection of poetry, Extended Remark: Poems From A Moravian Parking Lot, was published in 2015 by Portals Press (New Orleans). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Gargoyle, New Orleans Review, Booth Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review and Berkeley Poetry Review, among many others. He co-founded the literary magazine Hogtown Creek Review and for a decade lived in Holland, where he was a feature writer with Amsterdam Weekly. In 2010 he edited the anthology Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper’s Magazine.
Read his interview with Sacred Trespasses (and another poem) here.
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