1 New Poem

Hearts & Crowns

Missing arena floorboards take years
from me, throwing back to those days
freezing in pew aisle stare,
while canteen fryers sizzle-popped with
prepackaged shapes, cousins and friends
shaking the paved ice slush from
skate shop secondhand wares, that
dingy ding-up before signage
came with its blushed-blue expressions,
cutting ropes of desperate clinging
politicos to the wrangle-shake of voters’
hands:

how to go back to those days.

When the anchor wheel would spin with
penny candy bets for curious children
in pick-up impressed jeans ripped-up
jogging , we’d throw down quarters,
shiniest, given from father’s long-worked fingers,
from mother’s cashier apron pockets,
to see what there was in light,
the older boy-girls gesturing with face cards
across oil drum tables, and being so

there anew is something grander,
pulled away, forgotten never.