Skip to content →

Poem That Wants to Know When You're Taking out the Trash

Most of the people from the present

are gone now; we never held them

very tightly, but what our wounds lack

in depth, they make up for in breadth.

If living is a sort of punishment or reward,

well there’s no way I can finish

that sentence. I’m so young, I have

to show you how many years

with my fingers. The only thing worse

than advice is an opinion. This paper

bag is full of them, and a lone

hydraulic squeal is telling me

it’s garbage night. The moon agrees,

which you may think it automatically does,

but more and more it seems it won’t.

from They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re FullFind it in the library

Copyright © 2014 Mark Bibbins
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.

Published in Mark Bibbins Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this (publication, website, exhibit, etc.) do not necessarily represent those of the Idaho Humanities Council or the National Endowment for the Humanities.