look at the skate park sideways
and it resembles a Richard Serra
its black-clad art lovers high
on curves I rode up from Philly
on the Chinatown bus to see
the retrospective no one cared
about the lead plates or rubber
belts propped or hung from walls
but we awed at the tons of tortuous
steel a future city one woman
sprinted through in sneakers
her own attempt at art I guess
outside the sky was gray like news-
print rolling off a giant press
Mark Neely is featured in _AGNI’_s Emerging Poets Interview Series. His first book, Beasts of the Hill, won the FIELD Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press. He is also the author of a chapbook, Four of a Kind, which won the Concrete Wolf chapbook contest. His poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Boulevard, and Salt Hill. He directs the Creative Writing Program at Ball State University. (updated 11/2013)
Read “Half Falling, Half in Flight: A Conversation with Mark Neely” by Eric Higgins in AGNI Online.