Four Poems by Tim Hunt

         "Ten on Pump Three"

We are the people you do not see: 
a bob of peroxide in The Dollar Store 
(why are you here?).

Or that camo splotch at the next pump
as you fill up your leased SUV, 
fingers tapping your iPhone, 

while I measure ten into a Ford 150, 
Chevy or Dodge Ram—the bed’s history 
an unread scrawl of scrapes and dents—

playing a scratch off to see if I’m a winner.

And, true, we both know the saying 
about putting pants on one leg at a time,
but politics for you is about who gets.  

And keeps.

For me?  It’s about who is,
and isn’t.
And that’s a nuthin’ I know, 

it seems you don’t know.



         "Vaudeville Skit Revival"
(in which we imagine, once again, a Local instructing an Arkansas Traveler)

When you hear that fiddle riff, 
let’s pretend you’re the Traveler 
and I’m the Local a-rockin’ on a cabin porch.  

And when you step out of your fancy city car
waving that map that doesn’t show where you are 
as you demand to know Which way to Little Rock? 

I’ll rock a rock or two as if trying to understand, 
then hold out my corncob as if sighting along a line 
to somewhere and drawl, Doan know.  

Then you’ll sniff and deliver your line: 
You don’t know much.  Then comes mine: 
Least I ain lost. 

And again we’ll hear that fiddle riff, 
as the country folk and city folk 
laugh and applaud

as we vaudeville step it stage front, 
offering our bows, then do the Shuffle Off 
to Buffalo: one of us stage right.  

The other stage left.



         "Indian Casino (Middletown, CA)"

In the Twin Pines Indian Casino 
it is never day or night 
and all days are the days between.

If you looked up you would see the smoke 
drifting into the dark beyond the light 
glowing beyond the invisible baffles,
 
but you are watching the machine,
each pull of the handle 
rolling the cherries and bars, 
lemons and sevens as they slow, 
and stop, 
as you draw another coin from the paper cup, 
feed it in, and pull again—a rhythm 

like rocking on a porch 
as you bring the cigarette to your mouth, 
the inhale and exhale, 

but as if the sun has stopped 
and it is always the moment between 
the end of work and being called for supper 
as you rock and smoke 
and it feels as if the sun has stopped.

In the Twin Pines Indian Casino your cigarette 
dangles from your mouth as you reach and pull, 
knowing sometimes you’ll win a little, 
but mostly not, as the coins in the cup fall 

and rise and fall, 

and in this rhythm of no time, 
time passes, and it is neither day or night,
and you do not wonder how or when 
you became the dispossessed.



         "Still Life with Double Wide and Electric Fiddle"

The folding chair’s fraying straps 
sag from the aluminum frame 
as you sit in the shade of the trailer’s awning
watching without watching the weekly parade—

Beamers and Jags, a Cadillac SUV, 
the fiberglass gleam of the ski boats—
slowing 
through town on their way to the lake resorts.

And you know without knowing that no one 
will stop to ask the way or glance over 
as if you’re quaint or picturesque.  

Or even there.  

Because here is a place to pass through, 
pass by—

an off-brand gas pump, the diner’s window 
spray painted closed. 

And to be here is to be lost.  

Or would be if this were still a place.

And so you reach into the cooler for another, 
as the electrified fiddle plays the fills 
and Brooks & Dunn testify that good girls 
go to heaven, while bad girls 

go everywhere.

And because you must believe
in something,
you believe that that, at least, 
is somewhere, 

and you close your eyes 
and turn the radio up.

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