Ode to America
Ben Martin
We are the ones lifting
slave hymns to the sidewalk.
These hands are busted parking meters;
no one parks on this side of town.
We file in and out of your public bathrooms
and rinse away your smokestacks.
Every stoplight in town
blinks a bloody thumb at us.
We keep praying and doing the paperwork.
We are windswept paper doves in your fires,
ashes in your memory.
We wash it all off with sleep,
where dreams are rust in a scrap yard.
The only suicide we have left:
we forget we have faces.
Ben Martin recently graduated with a BA in English with Specialization
in Creative Writing from Southern Methodist University. In 2006 Ben won the Lon
Tinkle Prize for Most Outstanding English Major in Creative Writing, and his poem,
"Losing Your Page" has appeared in the department's newsletter, Erudition.
He is an instructor at The Writer's Garret in Dallas.