Doubts steal in your mind on insect feet when you’re back home
They don’t when
You’re in unfamiliar waters
But when you sip from
The cool well you grew up on
Your muse the moon of your childhood
You start to feel a familiar unfamiliarity with happiness
I lay my hand on my desk
Imagining braille in needles
Spelling out
C-O-L-D
This desk has seen
Too much
Everything of me
Held a Bible
Kids new international version
And a chemistry book for my first lost love
That of learning
But lithium and Leviticus both went unread
As I wrote instead like Marco
Polo!
Of travels and fine food
Silk and perfume
Or whatever the midwestern equivalent is
I etched experience into this desk
And the first hard frost of November can’t erase it
Braden Booth is a Missouri-based poet. His work is uniquely inspired by the classics, as well as his upbringing on a Southwest Missouri cattle farm. He is a poet capable of a familiarity and respect for the great poets of the past, while still burrowing into the gritty realities of our modern life. Braden is currently a sophomore at the University of Missouri, where he’s majoring in Psychology and minoring in Creative Writing. He has been published in EPIC Magazine and is currently an intern at Persea Publishing. Braden seeks to bring forth a wholly American form of poetry, a form reminiscent of Cummings and Whitman yet rooted in the land he came from and the small town he grew up in.