Goddess Fish Promotions Presents

These Are Not My Words: I Just Wrote Them
by Donovan Hufnagle

A randomly drawn winner will receive a $25 Amazon/BN GC – Enter Below

Echoing Chuck Palahniuk’s statement. “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known,” this collection explores identity. These poems drift down rivers of old, using histories private and public and visit people that I love and loathe. Through heroes and villains, music and cartoons, literature and comics, science and wonder, and shadow and light, each poem canals the various channels of self and invention. As in the poem, “Credentials,” “I am a collage of memories and unicorn stickers…[by] those that have witnessed and been witnessed.”

Refurbished

Susan taught me that poetic energy lies 
between the lines, white noise scratching 
and clawing between images, ideas,
       things…

And like a poem, 
the chair was molded by my Tio’s hands, 
an antique wooden upholstered desk chair. 

My Tio moved from Durango, Mexico 
to Forth Worth in 1955.

He became a mason and wood worker. 

He bricked the stockyards

He built the signs 

He died in 2005.

Now, 
matted. Worn. Faded floral design. Wood 
scarred like healing flesh. 

The arms torn, ratted by the heft of his arms 
and the stress of the days. The foam peeks
out. 

The brass upholstery tacks rusted. I count
1000 of them. With each, 
I mallet a fork-tongue driver under its head.
A tap, tap, tapping until it sinks beneath the tack, 
until the tack springs from its place.
I couldn’t help but think of a woodpecker.
A tap, tap, tapping into Post Oak, 
a rhythm…each scrap of wood falling to the ground
until a home is formed. 
Until each piece of wood like the tacks removed 
shelter something new. 

I remove the staples, the foam, the fabric, 
the upholstery straps 
until it’s bones. 
I sand and stain
until its bones shine.

I layer and wrap its bones with upholstery straps, 
foam, fabric, staples and tacks. 
New tacks, Brass medallions 
adorning the whole, but holding it
all together—
its bones
its memories,
its energy.

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Donovan Hufnagle is a husband, a father of three, and a professor of English and Humanities. He moved from Southern California to Prescott, Arizona to Fort Worth, Texas. He has five poetry collections: These Are Not My Words (I Just Wrote Them), Raw Flesh Flash: The Incomplete, Unfinished Documenting Of, The Sunshine Special, Shoebox, and 30 Days of 19. Other recent writings have appeared in Tempered Runes Press, Solum Literary Press, Poetry Box, Beyond Words, Wingless Dreamer, Subprimal Poetry Art, Americana Popular Culture Magazine, Shufpoetry, Kitty Litter Press, Carbon Culture, Amarillo Bay, Borderlands, Tattoo Highway, The New York Quarterly, Rougarou, and others.

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