Jim Whiteside

Furtive Monologue

All those rides from school and I never
kissed him once—the thin boy from drama class
who’d catch me before sixth period or during lunch
to ask if I could take him home, who lived
on the same side of town as me, who didn’t drive.
Most days we drove straight home, but others
we’d detour to the Bean Pot, half truck stop,
half diner, for the afternoon special: coffee and pie,
grinning with blackberry teeth. Truckers milled
through the doors wearing tank tops made
from t-shirts with the sleeves cut off, paying
at the counter for a hot shower. We’d joke
about trucker hookups,
Everybody got needs. Or we’d
go out to Center Hill Lake to watch for bald eagles
over talk about how we’d get out
of this horseshit town, sending a round piece of shale
skidding along the surface, each brief landing
leaving behind a set of concentric rings—
one, two, three skips. It was all I could ever manage.

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Jim Whiteside is the author of a chapbook, Writing Your Name on the Glass (Bull City Press, 2019), and is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, American Poetry Review, POETRY, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and Boston Review. Originally from Cookeville, TN, he now lives in Brooklyn.