Boys

By CRALAN KELDER
when the boys came over
theo with his banjo david
brought his voice we set
some poems to music
berrigan’s Train Ride &
the one about his old house
that he would miss and
the one that got to me
was Letters from Vicksburg,
Civil War sonnets, true stories,
transcribed by Gildner in which
the boy who never came home
wrote to his wife and friend
about how they “hit and
cut us all to peases” and about
the boys who “huncked the ground
and wept as close as posable

 

Cralan Kelder is the author of Give Some Word. His work has recently appeared in Zen Monster, Poetry Salzberg Review, and VLAK, among other publications. Kelder currently edits the literary magazines Full Metal Poem and Retort. He lives in Amsterdam with the evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers and their children.

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Boys

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