Decency
/Steve Cushman
Some days the decency of your neighbors is obvious
like the cake or casserole after a loss, the wave each
morning, the how ya doings and have a great days!
But what’s not so obvious is the way Jess,
the early morning jogger, tosses your newspaper
a little closer to your house or when mail is
delivered to the wrong box and they walk over
and give you what is owed, depositing it in your
mailbox without telling you or like last August
when you’d had a bit too much to drink after
Stella finally passed after that year of treatment,
and you fell asleep in the red and white striped lawnchair,
in your front yard, so far gone that they Meyers kid
on the corner was able to untie your shoes and
remove them, then tie the laces together and throw
them over the power line in front of your house and your
neighbor, the quiet one with the little white dog that barks
more than you like, spotted you while out collecting his paper
and pulled his A-frame ladder out before you woke and retrieved
the shoes, untied them and placed them back on your
feet, even tied them, so that when you woke you had no
idea why your shoes were tighter than normal and that
strange man was walking up the road with a ladder
in one arm and a for-once silent dog in the other.
Author’s Note: This poem actually grew out a writing prompt. For the longest time I have resisted prompts, mostly because I thought I write enough on my own and don't need someone pushing me to write about a particular thing. My poetry father, Mike Gaspeny, and I were joking that while neither one of us wrote to prompts we had both purchased the prompt book: Write It: 100 Poetry Prompts To Inspire because of a workshop we had taken, so decided to try one of the prompts for the hell of it. We asked, Lee Zacharias, Mike's wife and my MFA professor, who is a first-rate novelist and essayist and Hollins grad, to pick a prompt. She chose one that said write a poem about a high wire. For me this translated into write something about a power line, so that coupled with all those times I'd driven under shoes tied around power lines got my mind spinning and this poem grew out of that.
Steve Cushman earned his MA from Hollins University and MFA from UNC-Greensboro. He’s published three novels, Portisville, Heart With Joy, and Hopscotch. Portisville won the 2004 Novello Literary Award. Cushman’s first full-length poetry collection, How Birds Fly, is the winner of the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award. A new collection, Eating Paradise Without You, is due out in the fall of 2023. He lives in Greensboro where he works at Cone Health in the IT department.
