3 poems by John Yamrus

PAUL

wore
shirts the color of
old wedding bouquets.

his father
was the school janitor
and he (Paul) would get up
while it was still dark and help his father
wax the lanes at the bowling alley
which was in the first floor
of the school building
that housed grades
1 thru 8.

it was
the 1950s and
nobody thought twice
about putting kids to work early

and Paul’s father was no exception.

in the
summer,
Paul would
go out to the farms
and pick strawberries
for 25 cents an hour and
then he’d come home late in the day
and play baseball with us in
the school parking lot
before the bowlers
came in their cars
and we had to
call it quits
for the
night.

Paul wore
steel cleats on
the heels of his shoes
that clicked when he walked.

it was the
coolest thing i ever heard.

Paul
had blonde hair.

his father was a drunk

and
his mother
is lost to the memory of time.

NO AMOUNT OF SCRUBBING

would
ever remove
the smell of burnt cabbage,
old paint, grease
and regret
from walls which seemed
to be closing in on every side,

which
was okay
with Tommy…
he’d seen worse.

besides,
there was always Janey…

one day
she just might come back.

that thought
was enough to keep him together,
and it made all the difference in the world.

THE UNIVERSITY POET

had
a beard
and wore a
tee shirt that read
‘going nowhere fast’.

he
read
his poems
with intensity

and
leaned
against the bookshelf,

stroking
his beard and
pausing in all the wrong places.

his
students
loved him.

the
young girls
thought he was hot

and
he had an
apartment down the street
filled with an unfinished novel,
dirty dishes and dreams that would

never come true.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

In a career spanning more than 50 years as a working writer, John Yamrus has published 35 books (29 volumes of poetry, 2 novels, 3 volumes of non-fiction and a children’s book). He has also had nearly 3,000 poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world. A number of his books and poems are taught in college and university courses. He is widely considered to be a master of minimalism and the neo-noir in modern poetry. His latest books are TWENTY FOUR POEMS and SELECTED POEMS: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT. A volume of his SELECTED POEMS was recently published in Albania and TWENTY FOUR POEMS is due out in translation later this year.

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