Poetry Month 2012: Stephen Brockwell - Molly’s Irish Pub, Toulouse Street, New Orleans

Stephen Brockwell runs the small business http://www.brockwellit.com/company/. He spent the first half of his life in Montreal, and the second half in Ottawa. Where he will spend the third half is uncertain. His poetry collections include The Wire in Fences (Balmuir Book Publishing), The Cometology, and Fruitfly Geographic (which won the Archibald Lampman Award), The Real Made Up (ECW Press), and Excerpts from Impossible Books, The Crawdad Cantos  (above/ground press).

The following poem is from Cantos of the 1%


Molly’s Irish Pub, Toulouse Street, New Orleans

You know when the young, solo bartender
pulls a sweater over her t-shirt in 80 degree
afternoon heat that the two fellas at the bar,
deprived of a handful of teeth, are too

depraved for yet another plastic cup of liquor,
Their eyes articulate more than their slurs,
Their rope-and-scrap-metal callouses
reach for the cups beyond the cup.

Ply them with car bombs, smile, and pray
they stumble back up the Mississippi
to load another bulbous-bowed Shanghai
vessel with bales of scrap metal harvested

from junkyards beside overgrown fields that once
grew the same weight of cotton plucked by hands
no more black. To think that one of these crackers
loaded the raw material for my iPhone.


*Note - Photo of Stephen Brockwell courtesy of rob mclennan.



Free Counter