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Southern Cultures 9.2 (2003) 82-83



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Dollar Bill

Poetry by Michael Chitwood

[Figures]

Small-town AM station,
morning show,
still doing a gospel number every hour.
Who's listening?
Bacon tenders, baby sitters.
He yucks it up for the insurance office crew,
the stop-in, mini-mart gas shacks.
He's on the counter at The Hub,
talking coffee cups up and down.
A clown, a daily goofball,
regular as sun-up and death,
he reads the obits from the local paper
and sometimes adds a personal note.
Even the disembodied here have an anecdote.
Dashboard and countertop,
new tunes and same old same old,
beer on sale, car tires, paint,
link sausage, the grind and groove
of tune. We're coming up on noon.
Outside, in the parking lot, sparrows bathe
in the dust. Empires rise and fall. He'll notice
and say nothing of it on the air.

To celebrate the release of our poetry editor Michael Chitwood's new book, Gospel Road Going, the editors requested a poem from that work, which appears here courtesy of Tryon Publishing Company. His new collection of poems also contains "The Great Wagon Road or Why Appalachians are Mountains and a People," which first appeared in Southern Cultures.

 



Michael Chitwood is a freelance writer, visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, commentator for WUNC-FM, and poetry editor of Southern Cultures. He has published four books of poetry and one collection of essays, as well as poetry, essays, and reviews in a variety of newspapers and periodicals.

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