When I was in grad school many years ago, the years of the faux leather briefcase bought with those sweet grad school loan funds, I landed a kick-ass job as the managing editor of the school’s literary magazine, Panhandler. I was in school in the literal panhandle of Florida, but the journal’s name was quite apt for a low-budget literary magazine that printed underrepresented writers, and it’s produced by grad students of literature at one of Florida’s lesser known schools.
We would regularly receive submissions from prison inmates. Bad, just terribly bad poems. Poems with so much heart, though. The suffering and lonely words scratched onto crinkled, cheap lined paper, reaching out, trying so hard to BE poetic. It was a heartbreaking enterprise to turn these souls down. I would sift through the mail, searching for jewels among the submissions, our mailbox swamped with penitentiary & state prison return addresses. And there were always jewels, my friends. Among our staff, even, were poets and writers just warming up. Writers who today I still have enormous respect for.
Panhandler still exists today, and I hope they don’t sue my ass for this post. This poem has stuck in my head and still brings tears to my eyes to this day. Especially when I’ve had a glass of red wine and a little too much nostalgic longing for years past, when I was important in a different way than I am today. This glass is for you, Paul Grant, wherever you are today. Thank you for writing something that stuck with me for 24 years.
Resume
I can’t take apart a perfectly good watch
and ever make it run again. In a box
in a bigger box, I have a jar
filled with leftover parts from the times I tried.
But I can come up with enough passings
of hands over soft skin to soothe small wars away,
and I can put hospital corners
on the sheets of rain in your eyes.
And when time refuses to tell you anything
of its plans for you, and the pain of waiting
lays about you with its wicked thoughts,
call me. Because when called,
I can come and go. I can do that.
-Paul Grant