McDonald’s Dirty, Poorly Lit Place for Books

1 Minute Read Time

This photograph shows a poorly lit place of what seems to be chairs, tables, within a room of sorts.

The counterman says Welcome back— 
he’s never seen our faces.
If you want poetry, look in history.
Three floors of Popular Mechanics and ruin.
Nothing’s been shelved since Reagan 
took the oath. Across the street, 
sliver boys pander outside a bar 
called The Peter Pan. You know,
my brother says, for fairies.

Back in the stacks, deeper in dust, 
the local politics finds a refuge, 
safe haven for anarchist cookbooks,
the tracts of revolutionaries. I don’t know 
where to start. Books come here to die,
the counterman says. A single match
sets this place ablaze. My brother hands me 
a book about a time of dirt and anger,
and the title sounds how I once imagined us: 
upright, serious, and open.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Keith Ekiss

is the author of Pima Road Notebook, published in 2010 by New Issues Poetry & Prose. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his poems have appeared in Blackbird, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southwestern American Literature, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. His creative non-fiction has been anthologized in Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks (Bona Fide Books, 2011). The recipient of a Witter Bynner Poetry Translation Residency from the Santa Fe Art Institute for his work on the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio, his translations have appeared widely in such journals as Circumference, Copper Nickel, Mid-American Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Subtropics.

His translations of the Costa Rican poet Eunice Odio’s epic poem, The Fire’s Journey, was published in a four-volume set by Tavern Books between 2012 and 2019. In 2016, Bitter Oleander Press published his translations of Territory of Dawn, the Selected Poems of Eunice Odio. Keith has been a Jones Lecturer in Creative Writing at Stanford since 2007, where he teaches courses in reading and writing poetry and creative non-fiction. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the poet Robin Ekiss, and their son.

Return to top of page

Search