poem

[you get to feeling old]

by Mark Neely

you get to feeling old

like jolting awake

as the wheels touch down

forgetting for a moment

this bullshit town

then dragging yr busted suitcase

through the fluorescent

nonsense a twinge in yr bum shoulder

remembering yr first time

yr stupid body

like a balloon you lost hold of

in the mall parking lot

all of it long since abandoned

a speck on the sky’s x-ray

another minor moon

---

Mark Neely is the author of Beasts of the Hill and Dirty Bomb, both from Oberlin College Press, and Ticker, which won the Idaho Prize for Poetry and was published by Lost Horse Press. His fourth book, Late Stage, was published by Jacar Press in 2024. His awards include an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, an Indiana Individual Artist grant, and the FIELD Poetry Prize. He is a professor of English at Ball State University and co-editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.