Guess I should forget to buy
the lottery ticket every time
I buy my generic cigs
at the Get ’N Go. There’s no chance
my get-rich dream will happen.
Like to think that way though.
I’m lucky at shit like that time
I won a Sony boom box
at my son’s little league
all-the-trimmin’s baseball
banquet. I still play old
Styx and Grand Funk tapes on it.
I’d buy a cool house in the suburbs
and fill a room with Jim Beam.
I’d splurge for hard pack
Pall Malls; get my brother’s lung
fixed; fill my new hemi monster truck
with all the M&Ms my girls could eat.
Damn, all my stuff’s broken
down in front of my shitty garage:
the F-150’s bleeding rust,
the old Toro’s engine
is frozen solid like cement;
you can see the road
through the floor of my wife’s Cavalier.
That ping pong ball can go
ahead and dance. I’ll get rich
and sit by the phone watching
fuck all on the giant flat screen, practice
all day long how to tell people “Nope.”
Michael Catherwood‘s poems have appeared in AGNI, Borderlands, Burning Bush 2, Louisiana Literature, The Midwest Quarterly, New Plains Review, Sycamore Review, Red River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals. His first book was Dare. He teaches at Creighton University and is an associate editor at Plainsongs, where he writes essays.
