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Column 315

Spitwads

Intro by Ted Kooser
04.03.2011

We who teach cre­ative writ­ing have been known to tell our stu­dents that there is no sub­ject so com­mon and ordi­nary that it can’t be addressed in a poem, and this one, by Michael McFee, who lives in North Car­oli­na, is a good exam­ple of that.

Spitwads

Little paper cuds we made
by ripping the corners or edges
from homework and class notes
then ruminating them into balls
we’d flick from our fingertips
or catapult with pencils
or (sometimes after lunch)
launch through striped straws
like deadly projectiles
toward the necks of enemies
and any other target where they’d
stick with the tiniest splat,
I hope you’re still there,
stuck to unreachable ceilings
like the beginnings of nests
by generations of wasps
too ignorant to finish them
or under desktops with blunt
stalactites of chewing gum,
little white words we learned
to shape and hold in our mouths
while waiting to let them fly,
our most tenacious utterance.

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Disclaimer

We do not accept unsolicited submissions

We do not accept unsolicited submissions. American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2005 by Michael McFee, whose most recent book of poetry is The Smallest Talk, Bull City Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from Shinemaster, Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2006, by permission of Michael McFee and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2024 by The Poetry Foundation.