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  • My Small City
  • Dennis Trudell (bio)

All the bright young faces in grade school classrooms as morning becomes noon, and an old man who lives alone calls, “Please” to the sunlit trees and empty sidewalk and street outside his front window. That is a sketch of my small city.

Here is another. A homeless man who was asked to leave a branch of the public library last week has returned and slowly tears a page from a sixth book, which he crumples and adds to the others in his pocket. As that occurs, a gum-chewing middle-aged woman is told at Shopko to have a good day. “How?” she asks the salesclerk. “How do I do that?”

There are a limitless number of possible sketches in words that might be titled, “Thursday’s City.” I will make one more and then leave this room and home to drive on some of its streets. A black woman has entered a restroom at Goodwill beyond East Towne mall and is gazing at its stall where someone keeps trying to stifle . . . both “laughter” and “tears” occur to me. Laughter. [End Page 191]

Dennis Trudell

Dennis Trudell’s Fragments in Us: Recent & Earlier Poems was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. His edited Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball was published by Breakaway Books.

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