Brian Beatty
All In
The dealer
shuffles a deck
composed entirely
of low cards.
No royalty
shows its face
around here.
We push our piles of chips across the heavy
green felt of existence – hardly bothering
to look down at our hands before we fold.
Safe as Houses
An old wristwatch
stripped of its broken band
ticks away, a bomb
in the kitchen junk drawer.
Nobody hears it except me.
I listen to the twine and hammer, too.
Their ebb, their flow.
As hobbies go, mine,
I admit, is pretty mundane.
I rise from my chair like the moon.
About Brian Beatty
Brian Beatty’s poems and short stories have appeared in numerous print and online publications, including The Bark, Conduit, Dark Mountain (England), The Evergreen Review, Forklift Ohio, Gigantic, The Glasgow Review of Books (Scotland), Great Walks (Australia), Gulf Coast, Hobart, McSweeney’s, Midwestern Gothic, The Moth (Ireland), Opium, Paper Darts, Phoebe, The Quarterly, RHINO, Seventeen, Southern Poetry Review and The Sycamore Review.
Beatty is the author of the collections Coyotes I Couldn’t See (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2016) and Brazil, Indiana (Kelsay Books/Aldrich Press, forthcoming). He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Despite Beatty's current city of residence, his website is www.brianbeattympls.com. On Twitter he's @brianbeattympls.