Poetry By William R. Soldan

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​Riding Out #1

Never know when they’re coming for you
but it’s always early
still the dim-light hours (“lights out” is never really)
before the brights
pop fizzle hum
remind you where you are
on cold-rack mornings when some runaway dream
has you back free fucking around where you
shouldn’t be.

Then the hard ratchet and clang
metal doors banging open
bootfalls
and a leaving behind.

A brown paper sack and greasy slab of
government baloney
white bread and orange drink
half a dozen jump suited in a van
body funk fuming
rappin’ dudes and nappin’ dudes
fields whipping past
spring long sprung and jacked by summer
sun and blue skies

it never felt so untouchable as this.

Cuffs cutting wrists
that old bone groove.

County lines and long ass roads
the first of many fences.

Fileoutfileinpackedlikecattle
slapped by the noise of
clapping jaws.

Wait

to become a number.




Education

Some things just come easy:

Like thinking it could have been different
this particular last stop,
though just how much when there’s
no telling
the domino that caused the cascade?

It’s easy to say it was the planets
or the stars.
To say, Maybe if I woulda stayed in school.
Maybe if I woulda gone back.

It’s easy to see the faces of ghosts
when you close your eyes.
In the hard surface of the world
when they’re clear and wide open.

By now, the ones who had a chance,
the ones who had the right names,
are out there living, and it’s easy to think,
I coulda been a doctor or a lawyer by now.

But there’s school and there’s learning,
and it’s easy to light a cigarette
with two batteries and a razor blade.

It’s easy to make a tattoo machine
from a CD player, a spring, and a ballpoint pen.
Ink from ash.

It’s easy to bust a lock.

It’s easy to make a weapon
from a toothbrush
or a sock.

In school, they never taught us to
microwave a cup of baby oil and shaving gel
to strip a man’s flesh off like wet paper.

They never taught us how to survive
with next to nothing.

And sometimes it’s hard to accept.

How easy it is.


​
Bio: William R. Soldan lives in Youngstown, Ohio, with his wife and two children. He has work published or forthcoming in Bending Genres, Anomaly Literary Journal, EconoClash Review, Tough, and Open: Journal of Arts & Letters. You can find him on social media or at williamrsoldan.com if yu'd like to connect.