Two Poems By George Ducker

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Federal Express Field

Bee-swatter on the dash stumped with tiny feet.
It’s Memorial Day and Donovan
Wheels the truck right into the middle of Oak St.

Kills the engine. Three cars behind. Honking.
More honking.
Eventually they get the hint. Reversing.

We’ve got frozen tomato sauce to unload.
On the Lord’s work with the door
Gawked up, the ramp descending. The low

Whine of every single A/C unit on full blast.
Silver window droplets and
The heft, our lift gate giving up on us.

We’ve got pizza for you every other day.
We work on holidays.
How’s about you unfold some cardboard?

Like James Davis, you wanna get
Drafted and go down
Third week like a buckled horse?

Clemson/Cleveland, the row of window shades
Above. Orange is two colors of under-
Standing. Tomato sauce is blood on your hands.

Donovan’s got his tattoo all picked
Out for Friday. It’s Cincinnatus
With the plow. He’s can flex his trick

Knee like the curling pedal of a bike. You
Guys back in that Caprice
Can lay on that horn as long as you like.

We ❤ our Customers

Five-fingered thieves in the night
They joke and touch each other:
Return that bagel to the baker, brother.
Calumny, she thinks, is the proper word to follow C,
Bulrush pie-tins bobbing in the reeds.

Never too soon to confuse delight
With spray-on cheese, on in they moved with
Two thousand roommates and only a thousand bathrooms.
A tenant lease as thick as a hearse and twice as dark,
Gaming masks of burned tortilla, walnut bark.

His heart-song is a C-clamp holding everything together
And outside, again, that weather
Is a ducking canvas sail in tatters
Waiting for the coolest pigeon feather.
Her ping-pong table, a forest couch engulfed in flames,
But holding hands is just the basest of these games,
A flutter-by in which the way to wake
Is the best way to spend the day, or rather,

Did she see? That morning’s yawning leaves
Left a perigee — the opposite of an apogee — and
Less than edible? It’s important that they
Kept the service credible and bright, the
Day-makers trudging with illumined lancets.
“Go back to sleep for now,” she said, and left that night.

George Ducker’s nonfiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Bookforum and The Believer. He is from Greenville, South Carolina, and lives in Los Angeles.

Want more poems? Of course you do. That’s why you’ll be clicking through here to take a tour of The Poetry Section’s archive.

You may contact the editor at [email protected].