Reader’s Choice for the FuPo Poetry Contest (2021)
~
The Ancient Greeks Had It Figured Out
Hospitality above all else.
Any guest could be a god
in disguise, Dionysus in The Bacchae,
a Stranger rolling into Thebes
on a rouge wave. If one villager
had invited him in, offered ambrosia,
wine, friendship, a joke. Maybe then
nobody would’ve had their limbs torn off.
Or my father,
who was always knocking
in search of congeniality, who said
there are no bad people, just people
in bad circumstances, even after someone
in a bad circumstance told him he could shove
his country manners someplace poems don’t go. Like anyone
he was lonely and tried his best to become
unlonely. He went to bars and AA
for the same thing. He never knew when to stop
knocking and rest, and his tone,
hopeful despite desperation
in the one voicemail I saved
makes me wonder
if one villager
~
Harrison Gatlin is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Alabama and a subsequent and thus more recent transplant to Brooklyn, NY, where he misses his Alabama friends very much. Hi y’all!