Author: David Bottoms

David Bottoms is the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. The author of eight books of poems, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews, his poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks. For twelve years the Poet Laureate of Georgia, he has received the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize, both from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, and his new book of poems, Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, will be released by Copper Canyon Press in 2018.

My Old Man’s Homemade Dagger

In a battered desk in the feed room of my grandfather’s store,
I came across a knife
my father had made – high school, I’m guessing,
metal shop – a dagger with a bone handle,
blade cut from a metal file.

It looked ugly, dangerous.

“Put that back,” he told me
when I brought it into the store. He hardly glanced
at the two-edged blade, good only for murder.

I was young, obedient. I put it back
but have held it years in my memory,
just as he must’ve held it
in that desk drawer of rusted sockets and wrenches –

My Old Man’s Homemade Dagger full post

(118 words, estimated 28 secs reading time)

An Old Enemy

Just past midnight when I walked out back to piss in the yard

I saw at my feet
in a patch of moonlight

the old enemy coiled on the root of a cherry tree.

It didn’t rattle or move, and I thought it might be dead,
then the fat tail twitched
as a slight wind washed the root with shadows.

I backed away slowly, looking for the shovel
I kept leaning against the fence.

It wasn’t there. So thinking omen, I left the snake
and walked back into the house.

An Old Enemy full post

(133 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

Young Nurse, VA Hospital, 1945

Innocence, perhaps,
caused her to gasp and hold that memory for seventy years:

her leaning against the desk at the nurses’ station,
going over meds
with the head nurse,

then a young sailor rolling up in a wheelchair.
Could they give him something
for his pain? His legs and feet are killing him.

She looks down at his scarred face,
his narrow shoulders wrapped in a khaki shawl,
his hands folded in his lap, then . . .

But I always knew what was coming, even the first time
I heard the story. Her grimace tipped me off.

Young Nurse, VA Hospital, 1945 full post

(163 words, estimated 39 secs reading time)

All Beggars Would Ride

for Jane Hirshfield

Last night the beautiful horses of my boyhood galloped again

into my dream. I especially love the sleek black mare
with the white star between her eyes,

and remember her grace as she’d trot
across the pasture when I stretched my arm over the fence –

corn husks, an apple core, such small things, such large joy.
I’ve often wished I had a heart like that.

Ah, says my mother-in-law, if wishes were horses . . .

Permanent link to this post (81 words, estimated 19 secs reading time)