Loafing
Will we always be like this – so out of it
we don’t notice it’s noon until 4 o’clock?
and miss the party we didn’t want to attend
anyway. Still in bed curled against each other.
We’re lazy, we’re hopeless,
We waste our days. We’ve amounted to nothing.
The things we had to do give up on us, no one
shovels the snow, no one looks at the bank balance.
The cricket that snuck into the kitchen last week,
weeps that it chose to bet on us. Most telling of all:
the dryer in the basement buzzes: “I’m ready”
until it’s fed up and goes on alone
wobbling toward night, we’re lazy, we’re hopeless,
our money jangles and falls through the night .
David Tucker was born and raised in Tennessee. He graduated from the University of Michigan and attended graduate school in journalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. He has published two collections of poetry: Late for Work was selected as the winner of the Bakeless Poetry Prize by Philip Levine and published by Houghton Mifflin. His chapbook won the Slapering Hol poetry contest. He was awarded the Witter Bynner Fellowship by The Library of Congress, chosen by then poet laureate, Donald Hall. His poems have appeared, or will soon appear, in Ploughshares, Oberlin, The Dogwood Poetry Journal, he is a finalist for the Atlanta Review International Poetry Competition and was twice selected by Ted Kooser for American Life in Poetry. A career journalist, he worked in newsrooms in Toronto, Manhattan and New Jersey. Stories he has edited have won several national awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes and a Polk award.