MY BOYHOOD HOUSE STILL SHINES
THOUGH IT’S GONE
The entire neighborhood a parking lot now.
Nothing novel about any of this,
which is what makes it poignant.
The wrecks I’ve driven over the years
are out in force, but I see an Austin Healey
that stands out in all the splendor
of the orange house which once stood
on the corner of the block, reaping my praise
to virtually everyone else’s scorn.
A car pulls in, the driver kissing the woman
beside him while a boy in the back seat waves
to me with his book, home after all this time.
WOOLY BULLY
My wife told me
that when
she was a girl
she badly wanted
white Go-Go boots,
boots so white
they would temporarily
blind every onlooker,
and when I told her
that would be grand
she said “But I’m not
a kid anymore”
and time froze an instant
as if the world where
on the edge of ending,
“But go buy a pair,” I said,
“adults aren’t always right”
and she said she’d
think about it, leaving open
the chance of saving us all.
Tim Suermondt is the author of two full-length collections: TRYING TO HELP THE ELEPHANT MAN DANCE ( The Backwaters Press, 2007 ) and JUST BEAUTIFUL from New York Quarterly Books, 2010. He has published poems in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Blackbird, Able Muse, Prairie Schooner, PANK, Bellevue Literary Review and Stand Magazine (U.K.) and has poems forthcoming in Mudlark, A Narrow Fellow and Plume Poetry Journal among others. After many years in Queens and Brooklyn, he has moved to Cambridge with his wife, the poet Pui Ying Wong.