Benjamin Schmitt is the Best Book Award and Pushcart nominated author of two books, Dinner Table Refuge (PunksWritePoemsPress, 2015) and The global conspiracy to get you in bed (Kelsay Books, 2013). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Sakura Review, Hobart, Grist, The Columbia Review, Two Thirds North, and elsewhere. You can read his scary stories for kids in the Amazon Rapids app. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle where he also reviews books, curates a reading series, and teaches workshops to people of all ages.
Track 16
Tonight you asked me
how a kid could just go bad
I told you about standing
at the magazine rack when I was twelve
pretending to read Auto Trader
while stuffing Playboys and cigarette cartons
down my pants to sell at a discount
in the halls of my Christian school
The soil can accept
the roots of a tree or the roots
can accept new soil
it doesn’t matter so much as the growth
roots and soil are familiar
and grow like the poem
spreading branches through the margins
of notebooks into computer hard drives
and then maybe even into the lap
of someone I will only curtly brush with words
But you kept on asking me
why only some grow
and others do not
and what they will
eventually grow into
Let’s hope our daughter never takes
thirty pills of Dramamine at once
going five miles an hour on the interstate
as a dog criticizes her driving
from the passenger seat
Sometimes the flashlights of adulthood
shine in childhood windows
police plant drugs on orphans
and take them away again
teenage Abrahams hold
stillborn Isaacs in courtrooms
handcuffs bark on the wrists of star athletes
young prostitutes commit suicide
in plaster casts of Taylor Swift songs
In darker years I learned
how to make a burrito in a towel
with Fritos and ramen noodles
while crackheads joked about raping me
somehow I loved you then
and felt you in the linoleum
ten years before we met
maybe the crimes hollowed me out
to hold the rainbow bones of your laughter
I guess what I’m trying to say is that
maybe bad kids grow beautiful loss
