Its fine
incisors
grinding
my mother
fed my
father’s
fledgling
carpentry
concern
into her
adding
machine
as if its
hunger
could be
satisfied
costs and
savings
spooling
to our
wooden
kitchen
floor and
pooling
amounting
to nothing
a shop tool’s
shavings.
Source: Poetry (October 2012).
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
This poem originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of Poetry magazine
Poet Todd Boss grew up on a cattle farm in Wisconsin, and was educated at St. Olaf College and the University of Alaska Anchorage, where he received an MFA. Boss’s pared-down, idea-driven poems are propelled by internal rhyme and balance clarity with a nuanced attention to sound. “I think of poems as pieces of music, or a work of architecture,” he told the Utne Reader in 2009. “The poem is a space that you’re inviting someone . . .
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