Carl Adamshick is the author of two poetry collections, Curses and Wishes, winner of the 2010 Walt Whitman Award, and Saint Friend (McSweeney’s, 2014). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Layover

by Carl Adamshick

They keep paging Kenneth Koch at the airport.
Someone should let the announcer know
he is dead, there is no city he can go to,
no one is expecting him. Once, I applied
to be a horse. The mirror of night had shed
its clothes, and I needed to be something
that mattered. I needed to scrape my brown
flank against the bark of a ponderosa.

People on couch
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