Publication:  November 11, 2018 [100 copies]
28 pages
$ 9.00

Patrick Ryan Frank is the author of the poetry collections The Opposite of People and How the Losers Love What’s Lost, both from Four Way Books. He studied poetry at Northwestern University, Boston University, and the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Though a recent Fulbright Fellow to Iceland and current resident of Austin, Texas, he grew up in front of a small TV in rural Michigan. 

Response: I See Andrew

And then those often thought-of awful thoughts
fill the screen again. I follow him
across the stations, the bulletins and breaks
between detectives and the experts, shots
of crime scenes, cars on highways, grim reporters
interviewing boys outside the doors
of Sidebar and the Manhole, the Paradise.
It’s such a lonely life, my mother says
and I nod, yes. Sixteen, unlicensed, too big
for my bike and my small, unlikeable town, too far
from everything except the television,
I swallow all the details and the timelines,
the warning signs, the lists of sick obsessions:
sex and cash and vast attention. Andrew–
hard-eyed and yes, he’s handsome, sexy, yes–
is staring back as he makes his terrible way
across the map. Here is where I am,
in the flat of Michigan’s held-up open hand.
Here’s where he was, and here’s where he might be:
a wide America, its flat gray shapes
filled quickly in–a new black line, red point,
another picture of a smiling man.

• Purchase Come Panic here.
• Purchase The Opposite of People here.
• Purchase How the Losers Love What’s Lost here.
• Check out Patrick’s web page here.