Episode 123: The Catholic Episode

Episode 123: The Catholic Episode

 

Dear Slushies, we have a confession. We love being close readers as much as we love being close listeners. And if you are a fan of this podcast, we know the same is true for you. We’re delighted to consider Charlie Peck’s poems “Cowboy Dreams” and “Bully in the Trees” in this episode. We’re talking about unreliable narrators, homeric epithets, dramatic enjambments, and the difference between small “c” catholicism and capital “C” Catholicism. Confession and exultation, Slushies! Floating signifiers and The Sopranos. It’s a doozy! We hope you love listening in as much as we loved considering Charlie Peck’s poems for PBQ. 

 

(Oh, and we excitedly celebrate Jason’s fifth collection launching in April, Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire!)

 

At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 

Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and is forthcoming April 2024.

 

Twitter: @chip_nutter

 

Cowboy Dreams

 

Winedrunk along the river on a Tuesday,

boy howdy, my life. I ignore another

call from my mother because today 

is about the matted grass and the skipping trout.

When my brother jumps companies

after the Christmas bonus, it’s Ruthless.

When I pillage the family silver

to slick forty bucks at a pawn shop, 

It’s time you start thinking about recovery.

Instinct makes me wreck anyone who comes 

too close. You ever snapped a dog’s

stick just to watch his ears drop? I’m Catholic

with how quick I loose my tongue to confess, 

my guilt just a frequency my ears quit hearing. 

One snowy May in the Colorado mountains, I stripped 

to my underwear and raised my pack to wade

the glacial river. Dried by a fire with a pot

of beans. All night I dreamt of my lasso

and revolver, riding the hot-blooded horse

alone across the plains, no one in sight to hurt.

Bully in the Trees

 

Indiana cornfields leave so much 

   to be desired, and lately I’ve desired nothing

 

but clean sheets and pretzel bread. For a decade

   I was ruthless, took whatever I wanted:

 

last donut in the office breakroom, merged

   lanes out of turn. I stole my roommate’s 

 

change jar, sat on the floor of a Wells Fargo

   rolling quarters to buy an eighth. In this new year,

 

I promise I’ll stop being the loudest in the room

   like a bear ravaging a campsite just to be the bully

 

in the trees. For so long I thought my cruelty

   was the world’s fault, my stubbed toe blamed

 

on the coffee table’s leg, not my stumbling in the dark.

   Throwing every fish back to the river 

 

doesn’t forgive the hooked hole I caused.

   Once, I undressed a woman in the giraffe enclosure,

 

but maybe that was a Soprano’s episode. Once,

   my life was so ordinary I replaced it

 

with the things I saw on television. I ate fifty

   hard-boiled eggs. I robbed the bank and screamed

 

Attica! I stood in the trees cuffing the Nebraska

   suburb and watched my mother set the table

 

through the window. A porcelain plate at each chair.

   My ordinary life stranged by the window frame.

 

If I fall asleep before the credits, let me dream the rest.

   My pockets are empty, but the metal detector still shrieks.