Thinking Mexico out loud
drew stares of course mostly
from people expecting a roll
of words with r’s and l’s
and ending almost always in o,
or a bitter diatribe on unlearned
language, stolen jobs, cheapened homes,
or at least a travel guide list
of places they’d seen people sent to
by game shows, always coming back
with brown skin and smiles on their faces,
but what I meant was any place
I’d never seen before with more sun
than I could really imagine, or how
right now the best thing I could do
would be to get away closetwise
or otherwise to any place with yellow beer
and the taste of fire on my tongue,
or mostly just the idea of Mexico,
which means to me about the same
as their faces wet, a hungry crow,
a man eating suicide in the corner,
the night mostly like the day but darker.
Scott Owens‘ tenth collection of poetry, Shadows Trail Them Home, is due out from Clemson University Press this fall. His prior work has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Pushcart Prize, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, the North Carolina Poetry Society, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina. His poems have been in Georgia Review, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Poetry East among others. He is the founder of Poetry Hickory, editor of Wild Goose Poetry Review and 234, and vice president of the Poetry Council of North Carolina. Born and raised in Greenwood, SC, he teaches at Catawba Valley Community College in Hickory, NC.
