Nut Job

For Clivus

He’s got a clever onion. It peels itself in the other room so he doesn’t have to cry. Once he’s rubberized everything in the house (so he won’t hit his head on the sharp corners again) he feels better about the world, imagines he’s been born of some immaculate conception, feels special, slurping his bowl of oatmeal, drinking his black coffee in the breakfast nook. He’s been alone so long he’s used to it, the noiseless rooms he never enters. When the snow falls in the evening, he stands on his front stairs watching the flakes pile up, waiting with anticipation for the high-school boys to drive by, throw their ready-made snowballs at him and yell the name.

Kevin Carey is Coordinator of Creative Writing at Salem State University. Books include three books of poetry: The One Fifteen to Penn Station (2012), Jesus Was a Homeboy (2016) which was an Honor book for the Paterson Literary Prize and Set in Stone (2020), as well as three books of fiction: The Beach People (2014), Murder in the Marsh (2020) and Junior Miles and the Junkman which will be out in September of 2023 from Fitzroy Books, an imprint of Regal House Publishing. Kevincareywriter.com 

A Song for Kevin