New moon fresh risen through the din.
Traffic on the town’s state highway
Choked with cars stopped and stalled.
Starved for a lark from any source,
I crawled through an invisible hoop,
Greeted by Will Rogers on the other side,
His lariat twirling lightning quick.
Then crawled through the next hoop,
Saw Napoleon squatted on a spittoon
Studying maps of Waterloo.
He nodded—another hoop appeared,
So I crawled through it as well.
There was Gertrude Stein sitting,
Reading surrealist poetry out loud.
She flipped a page and another hoop
Arrived from the orange horizon.
My crawl through this one painful
As I’d grown by leaps and bounds.
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Thomas Piekarski's work has appeared in Nimrod, Agni, New York Quarterly, Paris Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, and others. His first book was published in 2010 by Nimbus Press.
