I’ve always balked at playing scales
but I’ll stand on a girder
hipshot in floral board shorts,
a vintage weirdo poking
the membrane between here and now.⠀
I need my sea green eyeshades
to scan this fiddly meter.
One boot, two boot. Network wreckage.
I’m the opposite of neutral
but I don’t know what I know.⠀
Put me out to pasture where grass
grows from cracks in the parking lot
and white lines turn me inward
to recite the arcane lore
splayed on stickies in my brain.
Lance Newman is the author of Proverbs of Earth (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2025), as well as three chapbooks: Satellite View (Finishing Line, 2025), 3by3by3 (Beard of Bees, 2010) and Come Kanab (Dusie, 2007). His poems have appeared in many print and web magazines in the US, the UK, and Australia. Newman teaches literature, media, and writing at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah. For more information, see http://www.lancenewman.org.