4-7-2020
Grant Clauser
Lucky
He remembers pushing the knife
deep behind the jaw
and cutting down to its tail.
If he was good he could wrap
his pointing finger around the guts
at the gill and pull them all out
in one feather like when his mother
waved at the driveway
and said father won't be back
or anything tonight
then went to her room
and shut herself for three days
until someone called the neighbor.
He remembers thinking that raccoons
must be so lucky
to find those fish guts laying
in the weeds
like a man who finds
his shotgun fully loaded
and everyone asleep.
-from Reckless Constellations--celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Founder and Editor, Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
We receive messages about violence every day in media. TV and movies glorify or fetishize it. The news leads with it. World leaders bargain with it. And individuals and families live with it every day. If violence is part of the human experience, it’s also part of the poetry experience. There’s violence in the Aeneid, in Shakespeare, in Frank Stanford. This particular poem doesn’t describe an event that happened, but it does capture some of the feelings and tensions from a couple of people I knew as a kid. It’s a conglomeration enhanced with imagination. Poetry is always the right place to examine the things we don’t want to face out in the open. Poetry won’t provide any answers, but it may offer multiple ways to look at it and, maybe, to cope.
Grant Clauser grew up and lives in Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA in poetry a long time ago from Bowling Green State University (Ohio) where he was a Richard Devine Fellow. In 2010 he was selected as the Montgomery County Poet Laureate by Robert Bly. His poems have appeared in journals including The American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, The Literary Review, Kenyon Review, The Journal, Southern Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry and others. His poem "Blessings of a Dog" won the 2023 Verse Daily Poem Prize. He works as an editor for a New York media company and teaches part-time in the MFA program at Rosemont College. He’s published six poetry collections: Temporary Shelters by Cornerstone Press; Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven, Winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award; Reckless Constellations, winner of the Cider Press Review Editor’s Award; The Magician’s Handbook; Necessary Myths, winner of Dogfish Head Poetry prize; and The Trouble with Rivers. In 2014 he was a guest poet of the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates. He’s also a founding member of the poetry improv group No River Twice. His favorite dry fly is the Parachute Adams. His favorite nymph is a basic Hare’s Ear with a brass bead. For bass he sticks mostly to a Clouser Minnow (no relation) and sometimes a Murry Hellgrammite.
