By Nick Norwood
Featured Art: “Flyboi” by Martins Deep

Dirt clods plucked from piles,
rocks, car parts in bar ditches—
burnt plugs, nuts and bolts and bits

of bumper and fender chrome—
bottles to bust on curb sides:
we hurled the world. Gutters

bore our leavings, the broken
glass, gum wrappers, gravel;
whatnots our siftings left. Boys

coming in touch with reality,
picking it up to hum it, feel its
grooves and facets. We found

money pennies at a time and
threw it all away. You cannot
know what you cannot palm

in the hand, rare back and sling,
rock and fire. Let the lingering
feel of it—the sting of a hand slap,

the burn of a hot muffler, balm
of your mother’s butter—be all
you know about what’s what.

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Nick Norwood’s poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Oxford American, Poetry Daily, the PBS News Hour blog Art Beat, NPR’s Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Pushcart Prize Anthology XLII, and elsewhere. His third volume, Gravel and Hawk, winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, was published in 2012, and his fourth, Eagle & Phenix, in 2019.