By Kenneth Pobo
I meet Napoleon in the Sears automotive store. He’s looking famous and dyspeptic beside tires. I ask how he feels. He blurts that he’s had a sad couple of hundred years, loathes being locked up in history books or made into movies. I say he’s a nasty man and because of him many died burning in Moscow. He says he doesn’t remember that. Where’s Moscow? Trees sucked up his memory. He lifts an eyebrow, a hairy butterfly. Ron the cashier flutters around another customer. We watch the butterfly change colors, a stoplight red, then yellow, then green, beneath a cracked ceiling.
Kenneth Pobo is the author of twenty-one chapbooks and nine full-length collections. Recent books include Bend of Quiet (Blue Light Press), Loplop in a Red City (Circling Rivers), Dindi Expecting Snow (Duck Lake Books), Uneven Steven (Assure Press), Sore Points (Finishing Line Press), and Lilac and Sawdust (Meadowlark Press). Opening is forthcoming from Rectos Y Versos Editions. Human rights issues, especially as they relate to the LGBTQIA+ community, are also a constant presence in his work. In addition to poetry, he also writes fiction and essays. For the past thirty-plus years he taught at Widener University and retired in 2020.
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