THURSDAY: Stepping into the Stream

POETRY WEEK 2024
Runner-up

BY BRENDAN PRANIEWICZ

Copyright is held by the author.

Lately, I’ve been trawling up and down
Langston Hughes’s rivers — stuck a worm
on a steel hook and saw its brown blood
explode and dry up like a raisin in the sun.

I drove Eudora Welty’s Chevy into the ocean
where shrimp danced on the dashboard
until the sun rose.  At dawn, I listened to
eucalyptus hearts beating through fog.

I studied wheelbarrows with William Carlos
in the rain, skipped Sunday’s service with
Wallace Stevens and invented a better God,
while saliva dripped down an empty microphone.

I caught a taxi from San Fran to Big Sur,
stumbled drunk over jagged rocks, while
lantern light illuminated Kerouac’s footprints,
and fell asleep to seals barking in black currents.

I swam through ferns on handlebars of
Beckett’s bicycle, sucked on a smooth
pebble weathered by storms, and listened
to bees gathering in honeycombs.

Took up bear-hunting, with William Faulkner,
and Sam Fathers painted deer blood on my face.
I saw the Big Woods peel back into suburbs.
Freight trains muffled the whippoorwill’s last whimper.

I wrote poetry in Szymborska’s apartment while
wearing mittens, and discussed how undersides
of dandelion look like constellations of dying ants.
We wrote odes to icicles, epitaphs to hyacinths.

I’m a self-titled giant with an immortal pen,
but gazing at all the written radiance before me,
where writers once painted their names on skylines,
I’m a clown and I’m wondering, where do I begin?

***

Brendan Praniewicz resides in Ocean Beach, California. He graduated from San Diego State University with an MFA in fiction, and he teaches at San Diego community colleges. Brendan is an award-winning writer who has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is currently working on a novel titled Beat It. He is also a photographer, and his work has been featured in galleries and magazines.  In addition, he’s a comedian who has performed all over the Southwest. Brendan is a creative free spirit who loves adventure and travel.