Ben Gunsberg is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University. He received a BA from Miami University (OH) before earning an MFA from the University of Alabama and a PhD from the University of Michigan, where he was the Sylvia Duffy Engle Graduate Student Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities.
Gunsberg is the author of the poetry collection Welcome, Dangerous Life (Turning Point, 2018) and the chapbook Rhapsodies with Portraits (Finishing Line, 2015). His poems appear in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry Daily, DIAGRAM, and Mid-American Review. He has been a finalist or semifinalist for a number of book contests, including the University of Wisconsin’s Brittingham and Pollack prizes and The Georgia Prize. His work has been honored by the Utah Division of Arts and Museums and the Great River Shakespeare Festival. Gunsberg’s poetry manuscript, Cut Time, won the University of Michigan’s Hopwood Award for Poetry Writing. He lives in Logan, Utah, at the foot of the Bear River Mountains.
Works
One Lousy Enemy
One Lousy Enemy
I’m thinking of the quiet Milwaukee street
where a skinhead knocked me off my bike.
This is not a loss too great to understand.
Not like losing a country or the will to speak.
Just a bike. Chrome frame, gooseneck, spokes.
Another theft in some American outpost,
another boy left flat on his back, blinking
at the sky, listening to his chain click, click
goodbye. I’m thinking about the difference
between that boy, age nine, and me
riding to work, pant cuffs stuffed in socks,
wind scraping my eyes to tears, so many tears
one might guess the girl I love is buried
in the cemetery I pedal near. But I’m not crying.
I’m thinking how lucky to live here now
and not Jerusalem during Crusades, or Odessa
with its pogroms, or Gulf Port with its slaves.
I’m thinking about my sloppy childhood,
preoccupied with BMX and rock music,
those gaping Sunday streets where I could ride
to hell and back with Jews, Muslims, and atheists,
our tee shirts taut sails, our callused palms
and checkered Vans, thighs pumping uphill,
elbow to elbow, free-born, well-fed children, rolling
past the mall like a glittering train, between our legs
bikes with sexy names like Redline, Haro, Hutch.
Especially Hutch. If ever asked to lie naked
with a bike for Annie Leibovitz, it will be a Hutch
I clutch. I’m putting romance into perspective,
beginning with my love of bikes, for which I am
not ashamed. We boys built ramps that sent riders
skyward in perpetuity, the big blue catching me
like a pop fly or a Tom Cruise or whatever I aspired
to be. This is what it felt like to ride and jump
a bike in 1986, Milwaukee, and this is how it feels
to look back on my stunned self, sickle-armed
off my seat by a shirtless teenage prick. How it feels
to put loss into perspective, as a lucky man should,
when thinking about stolen bikes and skinned knees
and one lousy enemy, unworthy of history.
Pando
Pando
T
he world’s largest organism is dying.
Some say new growth could save this silver-green
rootstalk topped by quaking, shield-shape leaves—
gust struck, they drop and plate the slope. Skin
soft enough to carve with a dull key
or pocket knife as JOHNNY ’12 has done
near other bark-scarred names. Google it:
you’ll learn the aspen share a knotted heart.
The Latin translates as “I spread.” Scroll down.
You’ll notice Pando makes poor firewood but fine
paper, first-rate saunas, where JOHNNY ’12
can sweat near KYLE ’01—strangers loined
by small, white towels at a luxury hotel.
Cracks along the grain, disease. TRUMP
engraved on rotten trunks. Also, TRUMP.
Machine Overheard Teaching Boy to Read
Machine Overheard Teaching Boy to Read
Rhapsody for Real Estate
Rhapsody for Real Estate
Reel me house to house,
our bank account ready for its root canal.
Let’s wander mid-century moderns,
poor cousins of Frank Lloyd Wright,
who flunked geometry because their flat-tops
failed to shed water. We can pitch
a new roof, replace this wine-stained carpet
with hardwood. Maybe walnut,
maybe oak—either way, I’ll whack
those planks into place. You can cook,
I can clean. Picture me on my knees
scrubbing toilets beyond innocent. Sweeping
closets. How pretty your dresses will look
chest to back, wife to wife. How sleek
my suits about to board first class
to nowhere. Let’s step outside
through sliding doors: O emerald square!
O butter-haired willow where a tire swing
drops like a hypnotist’s watch. We’re ready
to sway in hammocks, eavesdrop on katydids
as Jefferson did while framing our pursuit.
Let’s hold hands and float like Wendy
and Peter from backyard to half-bath
to master bath, unafraid of headache, allergy,
gas—our tiny tribes of medicine will colonize
these cabinets. My bride, our future
draws light and shadow through these blinds,
the yin and yang of dusk, and then the need
for bedside lamps, for we must read Tolstoy
aloud before sleep, before conception,
before track lights twist their little necks
to brighten our wild-haired infant.
I write this poem for him or her, for you, for we
should have a home where time hammers us
into place, all of us safe beside eternal
spice rack and knife block, apart from cracked
cement and crippled hula hoop, a home
where we see ourselves reflected in polished granite
countertops, midnight black, eyes within the rock.
Or, if not a home, at least this poem where we walk
barefoot across hardwood, whispering walnut, walnut, walnut.
Bibliography
- Welcome, Dangerous Life, Turning Point Press, 2018.
- Rhapsodies with Portraits Finishing Line Press, 2015.
