Charles Harper Webb

My First Week Teaching Poetry

I’m explaining how concrete imagery—
			gray bay-water bluing in the shock of dawn; 
a dead-shrimp stink—makes consciousness 
	    blink like a night-time field of fireflies. 

As I reach to snag the water I keep 
			on my table to wet my wizard, as I once 
heard a Freeport bait shop owner say, 
		    the student to my left in the poetry circle—

it’s too early to remember names—
			this student jerks up as if gob-smacked    
by The Muse. He flails his hand, mouth 
		    gaping, eyes wide. “One sec,” I say, 

swig deep, then face him. “Question?”
			“That’s my water bottle,” he declares. 
I glare at the blue bottle in my hand— 
		    same brand as mine—then whomp it 

down onto my table so hard, water erupts. 
			My face is a hot skillet, speaking of concrete
imagery. The class titters as I see my bottle,
		    undisturbed in its pouch on my backpack. 

Class-time drags by in a red haze. 
		    	“See you next week,” I plead as students 
surge out the door. The cursed bottle 
		    towers on my table, owner watching 

as I stuff my role book back into my pack. 
			“You can’t grade me,” his smirk insists, 
“now that, for all intents and purposes, 
		    we’ve kissed.”    


Roar 

When I laugh as the brutal chug-
		    chug-chugging of guitars erupts 
into the vocalist’s death-metal roar, 
		    my son, with his Malignancy tee-shirt 

and boiling buckets of scorn, demands,
		    “What’s funny?” To him at 16, the world 
looks rotten as a month-old corpse.  
		    That’s why he loves bands named Gut 

Rot, Disfiguring the Goddess, Aborted. 
		    That’s why he roars along to “Blunt-Force 
Castration” and “Meat-Hook Sodomy.” 
		    “That voice is like a hamster wearing 

a beach-umbrella-sized cowboy hat,” 
		    I shout over “Bamboo Pegs Through Arms 
and Legs.” “It’s the logical response 
		    to your green Prius, and dinner at 6:00 

or bust,” my son says, texting his girlfriend 
		    from his room in the “starter” home 
where I sweat blood and rip my guts out daily
		    so that we can stay.

 

Remote

“Engineers funded by the U.S. Military are working on electrical brain implants
that will enable the creation of remote-controlled sharks.” 
—Harper’s Magazine

This is more than just a way to sic Great Whites
on frogmen trying to clamp explosives to our ships.
Penguins—funny, just walking around—might
be made to dirty-dance for the amusement
of our troops. Remote-controlled seagulls

could bomb hostile destroyers. Plague-fleas
on remote-controlled rats could make foes
itch half to death before they pitch into a grave. 
Remote-controlled bankers could loot billions,
costing our adversaries jobs, homes, and marriages

while remote-controlled fashion-designers
make their women feel fat. Instead of being
armed with poison, razor blades, and mines,
remote-controlled hookers could be made
to whine, “That’s all you’ve got?” They could

impersonate nice girls, wed enemy soldiers,
then infect them with post-existential rot
while, back at home, our engineers relax
in La-Z-Boys, guzzle cold beers, and wonder
what’s that crackling noise between their ears.

 

Charles Harper Webb's latest collection of poems, Sidebend World, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His new collection of poems, Old Gnu, will be out from Longleaf Press in 2025.