Halfway North

Behind me a man at the Minneapolis airport

says: “I’ll see you at the Midwest Poultry Show”

except what I hear is not that but

“Midwest Poetry Show” which makes

 

slightly less sense but it’s too late,

I am already thinking of their sleepless night,

all the poets waking before dawn

and coaxing their balky poems into cages

 

lined with torn strips of newspaper

that are soon bunched into nests and absently

pecked at and read while they, the poems, make

derisive crowing comments to each other as the poets

 

drive their dented trailers carefully into the sunrise,

drinking bitter black coffee from the Hudson or Farmington

Kwik Trip until they arrive at a metal barn, bleary-eyed

and hopeful, now with combs and scissors and spray bottles

 

in hand they are fluffing out long metaphors and snipping

at tufts of too-flowery and winding prose, was that

too much? Well, it’s too late now, it’s all over

but the crying as bespectacled readers circle the cages

 

skimming unfairly, squeezing the stanzas and

splaying the words out at the ends, looking for

allusion, alliteration, allegory, imagery, rhymes

and near rhymes, iambic pentameter and free

 

verse while the poets stand silently near, cups of coffee

long gone cold under the giant ceiling fans, kicking stray

punctuation like curses along the concrete floor, already

reading the look in the readers’ eyes, thinking about next year,

 

when, surely, but surely,

they will place.