M A R G I E  The American Journal of Poetry     www.margiereview.com

Published Annually in the Fall                                     MARGIE  P. O. BOX 250, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63006-0250

It’s easy to want someone dead.

Take this guy who removed

the muffler from his Harley,

now tearing down the block

at 3 a.m., or the dickhead

flicking a lit cigarette from his car

to the sidewalk. Something tells

me the woman tossing chicken

bones under the bus seat, now licking

her fingers, is of no use to the world.

Doubtless if they were weeping

in confessionals over their small

though highly revealing offenses,

or scribbling apologies in journals,

I’d feel differently. And don’t get

me wrong: I’d rather not be the one

to gun down the Harley guy—

though there are excellent sight-lines

from my fire escape. I’d just

as soon he plunge quietly into

a tectonic gap in 7^th Avenue,

volunteer for long experiments

in orbit, beta test those new

exploding cell phones.

I never feel this way towards kids

I teach in the detention center,

though when they’re older, fully

tattooed and towering over me

with hardened contempt, hollering

back to one another as they march

in gangs through the subway car—

yeah, maybe then I’ll want them

gone. They tell me they want to die

young, draw graffiti that translates

to leaving a good corpse. They brag

to one another about throwing

their pets off the roof, and how

badly their stepfathers beat them.

When I was six my father’s father

shuffled to where I was playing

on the living room rug, took my

head in his hands and rammed it

into the coffee table. I later was told

he’d been down the hall trying

to take a nap and heard me laughing.

I was six and he flung my head

into a table. He’s dead now. What else

do you need to know about him?

DOUGLAS GOETSCH's most recent book is The Job of Being Everybody, winner of the Cleveland State University Poety Center Open Competition.  His work has appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and The Threepenny Review, as well as the recent Random House anthologies, Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day.  He teaches creative writing to incarcerated teens at Passages Academy in the Bronx, and is Founding Editor of Jane Street Press.