Poetry by Bob King

       Nicholas Erwin CC



What It Takes to Solve a Crossword Puzzle


I don’t know. Seriously, I don’t let myself
do crosswords because my day disappears
when I can’t come up with the 8-letter-down
for not-the-stone-but-its-pusher-up-the-hill
yet again, but I know I know this I just can’t
access the part of my uphill brain that knows
I know this. Do you ever do something so
much that you see that something so much
in almost everything you do? I’m talking about
overplaying Tetris. I’m talking about seeing
people as fitting into the tight fill-in-the-boxes
of daily crosswords, your finances into
the Sudoku, a certain je ness ais quoi about
the ritual of Wordle, & god I miss newsprint
& what’s a three-letter word for traitor?
What’s a poem about? About the only
three things poems are about are love,
death, & the inevitable passage of time,
or some kind of combination of the three.
And then Americans came along & added
a fourth heretofore-unforeseen-thing:
traumatic childhood experiences, & I’m talking
about more than the house John Berryman
wrote Dream Songs in or the tragedy of entirely
misnamed Native American boarding schools,
as schools suggest some semblance of autonomy,
of free will, of knowing history. And nothing
is more free than when participating in, or
allowing others to participate in imagination,
at least according to one Scotsman. Maybe
Ancestry.com will eventually show us exactly
how we’re all related, at least imaginatively.
No but really, doing crosswords well requires
reading well & watching well, watching as in
observing, risking being a weirdo, & even
knowing the occasional lyric to the latest
pop star’s hit—who doesn’t assume she
invented sequins, which is only one thing
I admire about her. My mother has this thing
where she brags about family members to
other family members, but rarely actually tells
the actual object of her admiration how proud
or amazing or intelligent she is. Which is crazy,
as that object of admiration would absolutely
leave the atmosphere—news that would carry
her for at least a week— if she was told such
a compliment. And yet there’s this withholding. 
A flower doesn’t just appear & solve itself
over a cinnamon roll & latte on a Sunday morning
in a bakery that reminds you of a European café.
A flower, the flower itself, the object of admiration,
the perfumer of morning, is the end-of-life
or almost end of life result of a lot of growing
& I think most people wrongly see it as just
the beginning, but not all trees fruit after flower.
We’re not all raspberries & while dogwoods
can be goddamn beautiful, not too often
do we think of the bud before the flower,
the weak stem, the weak stem pale green
to almost the point of yellow & not ever
turning green, how tenuous it all constantly is,
the white roots in the deep brown soil with
the pre-packed nitrogen pellets, almost
guaranteed to grow. Hey, what’s an eight-letter
word for the most abundant periodic element
in the universe? But I’m not the person
to tell her. I’m talking about avoiding adopting
an identity that attempts to accrue vanity,
the old-school term for a six-letter word
impersonating a five-a-four-a-three-letter
word meaning something else. And two.
And one. Goddamn, if you have the power
to give someone rocket fuel, why wouldn’t
you want to count them down to launch? 


+ Inspired by Dream Songs by John Berryman (1969), Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown (1970), The Reformatory by Tananavire Due (2023), The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (2021), & An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume (1748).




Bob is an English Professor at Kent State University at Stark. His poetry collection And & And published in August 2024 & And/Or is forthcoming in September 2025. Recent nominations include 3 for Pushcart Prizes & 2 for BoTN. New work appears in LEON Literary Review, The Broken Spine, Allium: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, & La Piccioletta Barca. He lives in Fairview Park, Ohio. X: @KingRobertJ Website: bobking.org