top of page

Tattoo

My son, a tattoo artist, wants to do one,

but since my heart attack (aspirin, Plavix),

he’ll text me a new design, but won’t ask,

because of the stent, what I won’t have done;

instead, we talk of new ink or chair or gun

or new girl, not only if they’re having sex.


I like tattoos. The closest I came to one,

I was on day-liberty in basic at the Great Lakes—

after the smoke chamber exercise, without mask,

but before being shown how to fire a weapon—

I took the train to Chicago instead of Waukegan,

grateful, with Vietnam raging, to be a Reservist.


I window-shopped different tattoos in a parlor

I’d seen on Navy lifers, and then went to a bar.


 

Stephen Gibson is the author of seven poetry collections: Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas Press), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press).


Recent Posts

See All

The Cake

The night before being arrested and sent to the prison from which he’ll never emerge, the playwright David Gronfein has a long and bitter...

And Fancy Free

By the third time my brother was arrested, we were experts at posting bail. I was up late reading David Copperfield again and answered...

I Would Draw Those Birds

if my eyes were better then again they fly so fast to the feeders before swooping off can’t draw that fast even if I were a gifted artist...

Comments


bottom of page