This week, we’re proud to feature work from some favorite Tin House contributors who’ll be appearing at Wordstock, Portland’s book festival, on November 5th. Catch Young on the panel Tales of Two Americas: Inequality in the United States with Karen Russell, Richard Russo, and John Freeman. “Ring of Fire” first appeared in Tin House #37: The Political Issue.
RING OF FIRE
At the strip
club we come
for the ladies but stay
for the buffet.
In Vegas we feel paradoxical
as jumbo shrimp–
Everything here is for sale
& what’s not
for sale is free.
In walks Dennis Rodman
hat pulled low, wearing a disguise
in hopes
of getting recognized. Between dances
they announce him
over a microphone
like bingo.
When we return
to our hotel, dawn
has long gone
& the pool slowly fills
with fools drained
like us.
We brown our already
brown bellies
& I ask my buddy
Think anyone
would guess us black
boys are a doctor
& a professor?
It’s not that folks can’t
imagine it, just
they don’t even bother
to consider us
at all. Unlike us,
our drinks are expensive
& too strong. All night long
at the Hold’em table
we’ll gamble it all
like tin men hoping
for hearts.
Kevin Young is the author of ten books of poetry, including Book of Hours, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels, winner of a 2012 American Book Award; and Jelly Roll: A Blues, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the editor of The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink and seven other collections. His book The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won the PEN Open Book Award. He is currently the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and English and curator of both Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University.