The Splinter Generation

The garbage man will make it all all right
for Nandra Perry

JeFF Stumpo

Hear the author read this poem

You ask me to speak at an anti-war rally.
I ask you for the efficiency of ants
come lately across a dead lizard in my driveway.

Day one: the long brown body, belly-up in the sun,
mouth agape and claws still hanging on to the invisible
orb of its life. I must have crushed it

taking the garbage can to the street last night,
but have no memory of it, and therefore
can only regret in the abstract.

Day two: a scattered line leading to the bushes.
Amidst the deliberate chaos I am mesmerized,
then remember the lizard, then remember

to regret, then regret.
Day three: a tail.
Would that all our problems

could be carted away so easily.
But such attitudes brought us to this point,
did they not?

JeFF Stumpo is a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University, where he is at work on one of the first two creative dissertations at that institution. In his (cough) free time (cough) he founded and hosted the local poetry slam, co-edited an online journal of regional writing, brought Poetry in Motion (R) to campus for a year, and helped plan several massive literary festivals/conferences. He is the author of two chapbooks, the multilingual El Oceano y La Serpiente / The Ocean and The Serpent (Zenane 2004) and Riff Raff (Unicorn Press 2007). His individual poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, Rhino, redactions, and Sentence. "The garbage man will make it all all right" was first published in The Texas Observer. If you made it this far, you could have saved time by visiting www.jeffstumpo.com. But thanks all the same.