Poetry By Forrest Miller

Don O'Brien CC




Sticky


Poverty is sticky; that’s what they miss
when they have never lived in it. 
They think it’s just a matter of working hard
and making smart calls, 
but that’s not how it works. Not at all. 
You stick and you stick and you stick.
You try everything, but you can’t get rid of it. 
It gets in your clothes and into your skin. 
It sticks to the bottom of your shoe and gets tracked in. 
When you try to wash it off your face, 
it sticks to your hands; it gets all over the sink. 
It smudges on the walls, it gets in the food, it gets in your drink.  
You ingest it and digest it. It poisons the way you think. 
And then you listen to people who are full of crap
give obvious advice about using some elbow grease, 
as if you couldn’t possibly have thought of that.

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Aspens


The aspens of Colorado have turned
the mountains to nostalgia, yellow and stale
like the pages of an old book.
Hard labor has peeled and blistered 
my skin with ache and purpose.

Open flames and the heat of the factory floor 
give way to blasts of cold as I maneuver pallet jacks
through freezer doors and loading bays
in a raucous and rhythmic dance of machinery and labor. 

We do not see the sun, arriving before dawn, leaving under
cover of flickering street lights, trudging back to our pick-ups,
over the thin sheet of crusty snow. We rub our hands together
in the cab, our breath rising in clouds from chapped lips, 
waiting for the heater to kick in. 

Every morning in the blackness of the predawn, I stop for coffee, 
mostly to see the cute girl who opens up the café.
I think she likes me, but we are both shy. 
And every Saturday when the factory finally stutters to a halt
after six consecutive twelve-hour days
we make our way to the Blue Moon and drink tallboys
of Busch and Coors, uncorking a riotous party that drowns out
the rest of the bar and other patrons shoot us dirty looks. 
We rejoice in the labor and time-and-a-half
that our youth allows because it means we still have
a lifetime of possibility before us,
because it means we still have time— 
for what, we do not know, but that is the
intoxicating promise of youth.

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Forrest Miller is a poet based in Vermont and the Pacific Northwest whose work blends narrative and lyric approaches to explore memory, labor, relationships, place, identity, and the ways ordinary moments accumulate meaning over time. Drawing heavily from lived experience, his poems often examine attachment, change, longing, and the complicated work of becoming oneself.