Beach Bums of the Buffalo Southtowns
- Beach Bums of the Buffalo Southtowns
The sun engenders bathers on the beach.Or just the one. To land his kind of leather,stretched taut around middle-aged flesh, you eitherhave to heave your bod way south of here or teach
it to sit still for months on end, a cooler in reach.Pale strains of “Margaritaville” and “Seether”traverse the autumn air and tint our leisure.Perhaps his radio would have found a niche
audience in the wind-tossed octet out rehearsingon sand flat a bleach-mop soon-groom-dude’s notionof how maids and gents meeting by the ocean
(Lake Erie) weave up front, order reversing.Jeans’d, jacketed, sandaled, stiff, everyone laughsand shuffle-jogs through what he choreographs. [End Page 136]
Douglas Basford’s poetry, translations, and prose can be found in Poetry, Ambit, Narrative, Subtropics, Diagram, American Poetry Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Words without Borders, The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and other venues. He has received scholarships from the Summer Literary Seminars and the Sewanee and Bread Loaf conferences and honors from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Santa Fe Art Institute, Southwest Review, The Evansville Review, Smartish Pace, the New England Poetry Club, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Foundation, among others. He teaches and runs the composition program at the University at Buffalo, co-edits the online journal Unsplendid, and is prose editor for The National Poetry Review.
