KG NEWMAN - POEMS

KG Newman is a sports writer for The Denver Post. His first two poetry collections, While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime and Selfish Never Get Their Own, are available on Amazon. The Arizona State University graduate is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP.

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American Atrophy
​

​ 
While we’re comparing nuclear buttons
what’s the brass tacks on the tax
to get the lat machine at the rec fixed,
the cable that snapped plus all the rims
rusted without nets? Until then,
while apocalyptic shit-talking is done
via Twitter, I’m out here with
the Mortgage Lifters, watering
the tallgrass. Somebody has to be
responsible around this place:
taking out the trash, paying for kids
to ride the gondola just to see
an unfiltered view of the sun.
This is the only way stable genius
can develop now days — from
the mountains to Washington,
and on all sites between,
fake news takes you off track
so fast you often find the ugly truth. 

The Grandchildren’s Vow
​

​When President Teddy hit the wilderness at Yosemite—sleeping on stacks
of pines in mid-May snow no less—he’d lie on his back and stare up at the sequoias
as the embers burnt down. Granted it was 1903 with no Twitter to consider.
We had yet to send a million troops to die at war. But Teddy, he was terrified
for the sequoias. With frost on his mustache he vowed to his grandchildren
to never see them razed by some resort, trunks groaning as they’d domino
each other, two millennia of sparrow secrets boomeranging, lost to the wind.

Reckoning
​

​The history of forgiveness that is
your sonhood, and the little
that is not, was heaped
together in a thick deposition,
expensive defense of fitness,
the hugs and the drugs
depicted on tussocky ground
beside sun-rusted flatirons.
 
The cabin I cannot complete
without his help, the momentum
of two different Disston saws:
Firs shedding in September to pack
the land a couple inches toward
winter, insulating itself until
spring, waiting for wood to be
carved back to bone.

 

Almanac For My Fatherhood 
​

​ 
In my dreams, wheat fields. I search them alone, in a tux. This dirt,
white as snow. My father is afraid of cold. All I remember
is what I remember most—phlegm in his throat, red encroaching
from the corners of his eyes. My father, he fears failure and
losing hair. Your mother and I kept it together as long as we could,
he tells me. The dirt is indented from plights before mine.
I start to run to find those souls that have found the meaning
of themselves, but find only a lone silo. My father, he fears
clouds, the way they can take any shape or the blurred scene
where I come to be. It’s an unseemly truth that surviving
in the corn requires one to abandon all sense of direction.

Zugzwang
​

To deceive myself from myself,
I’ve used various forms of vapes,
the nostalgic smell of summer rain.
“What a double rainbow,” I’ve said,
 
while Twitter caved with hate on itself
and I couldn’t define what I felt.
 
*
 
The homeless who played chess
on 16th Street
simultaneously lived with Fisher
and the contemplation
of my long lunchtime stares.
Nearby, a busker succeeded
in being frozen and alive --
 
What could be more regular
than head-to-toe, gold-paint veneer?
 
Yet, I remember being surprised
when I heard the busker speak
and the conflict I felt
as I watched a younger man,
still strong with hope, get hustled
by an old bearded guy and his
shopping cart full of chess books
and empty bottles.
 
                           *
 
One must be leery of a man
who knows he’s damned
and is willing to gamble
anything to prove it.