Erik Schuckers | Pretty Boys in Trouble

Pretty Boys in Trouble. Poems by Erik Schuckers, selected by series editors Jeff Walt and Karen J. Weyant as Number 27 in our Keystone Chapbook Series.

Release date:  July 16, 2024 [100 copies]
25 pages
$12.00

Cover image by Michael Wynne: http://www.kissandtellpress.com. 

Erik Schuckers studied writing at Allegheny College and the University of Sheffield. He picked apples, cleaned theaters, and sold books in the US and UK before moving into nonprofit and academic work. He lives and writes in Pittsburgh. His poetry has appeared in a number of journals, and his nonfiction has been published in The Holy Male, The James Franco Review, and Not Just Another Pretty Face (Beautiful Dreamer Press, 2016).

Pretty Boys in Trouble

spill across the prewar tiles, pool 
barbed and bareback, spatter plazas 
undarkening to revelation, calligraphies 
of tenebrous ink. Your razored cheek-
bones camera-ready, made for naked
hands, shatter shutter-clicked. 
Stretch your fretless throats to 
touch, a slice of dream. Each vein 
swells a chord of music written long 
before your mothers’ birth, before your 
fathers thrust their panic into you. 
This city pierced with embers 
and alarms intuits your next move, 
the alley of your flight, the slash
of light in every doorway sharpens
black. The clocks drain every neon 
minute. A sluice of blue hours gutters 
underneath the streets. Over 
and again in broken windows, shards
of empty panes, mirrors of rain
collect at your stopped and tender 
feet. Be still. Breathe soft. See 
how the sky cracks, almost 
gently, to show what you can bear.
Hear the sleepers rustle 
in their paper beds. Bend 
your knees the way they taught.