John Mann

 


It Is Sweet and Fitting


He decides to join up. Age not
relevant this time. They told
him somebody’s butt needed
kicking. He is given a call-
back number, a couple of bags
of pinto beans. They will send 
him west and north. His
nickname will be Mr. Compass.
Declarative sentences only
need apply. Discharge a
possibility. He is hungry.
All these years a gnawing.
Look at the religious ones
at the side of the road
filling their sacks with anger.
Dogs have bigger hearts.


John Mann has had poems published in many literary journals. He won a poetry fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council in 2002. His play, Mass Destruction, Weapons Of, was produced by the New World Arts Theatre in Goshen, Indiana, in 2004. Finishing Line Press published Wyoming, a chapbook of poems, in 2008. He was a resident fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2008.

“It Is Sweet and Fitting” appears in our Spring 2010 issue.



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Kudos

Congratulations to all of our writers whose work was selected for The Puschart Prize XXXVII: Best of the Small Presses: Timothy Hedges, “Civil Twilight,” (Fiction, Summer 2011), and M. C. Armstrong, “The Seventy-Fourth Virgin,” (Fiction, Summer 2011).

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