pigshitpoet

2023 Award For New Poets Winner: “Twelve Thousand Pounds Of Salt” By Ira Goga

Twelve Thousand Pounds of Salt

All afternoon, his passenger,
I fantasized. Summer’s lush lightning

in the distance. And the phlox, whose name
means flame, swept the hillsides.

I think, maybe, I cannot write
about it. How long I’d gone untouched

by danger but flirting, risk licking at my heels.
I wanted it, I’ll say now, because it is true

that I also did not, and said nothing.
What I told him, he wouldn’t believe

until he saw for himself. At the rest stop,
my clothes on the seat. You’re beautiful,

though it was dark in his truck and my body
obscured, though he’d already touched me.

You’re sort of like the best of both I guess
because I’m a guy with a pussy. In the trailer

he carried a kind of salt, twelve thousand pounds
to be made into fertilizer. Name something heavier

and slower to burn the mouth
than shame. When I feel the most myself,

I am mostly invisible. How I’d traveled,
like water, all through the country. Slipping inside

another’s assumptions, I don’t mind.
Believe what you’d like about me.

Through meekness I lived
to see him in such an unguarded moment.
https://www.frontierpoetry.com/2024/04/17/2023-frontier-award-for-new-poets-winner-ira-goga/