Episode 123: The Catholic Episode Painted Bride Quarterly’s Slush Pile

Episode 123: The Catholic Episode
 
Dear Slushies, we have a confession. We love being close readers as much as we love being close listeners. And if you are a fan of this podcast, we know the same is true for you. We’re delighted to consider Charlie Peck’s poems “Cowboy Dreams” and “Bully in the Trees” in this episode. We’re talking about unreliable narrators, homeric epithets, dramatic enjambments, and the difference between small “c” catholicism and capital “C” Catholicism. Confession and exultation, Slushies! Floating signifiers and The Sopranos. It’s a doozy! We hope you love listening in as much as we loved considering Charlie Peck’s poems for PBQ. 
 
(Oh, and we excitedly celebrate Jason’s fifth collection launching in April, Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire!)
 
At the table: Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, Jason Schneiderman, Samanatha Neugebauer

 
Charlie Peck is from Omaha, Nebraska and received his MFA from Purdue University. His poetry has appeared previously in Cincinnati Review, Ninth Letter, Massachusetts Review, and Best New Poets 2019, among others. His first collection, World’s Largest Ball of Paint, is the winner of the 2022 St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press and is forthcoming April 2024.
 
Twitter: @chip_nutter
 
Cowboy Dreams
 
Winedrunk along the river on a Tuesday,
boy howdy, my life. I ignore another
call from my mother because today 
is about the matted grass and the skipping trout.
When my brother jumps companies
after the Christmas bonus, it’s Ruthless.
When I pillage the family silver
to slick forty bucks at a pawn shop, 
It’s time you start thinking about recovery.
Instinct makes me wreck anyone who comes 
too close. You ever snapped a dog’s
stick just to watch his ears drop? I’m Catholic
with how quick I loose my tongue to confess, 
my guilt just a frequency my ears quit hearing. 
One snowy May in the Colorado mountains, I stripped 
to my underwear and raised my pack to wade
the glacial river. Dried by a fire with a pot
of beans. All night I dreamt of my lasso
and revolver, riding the hot-blooded horse
alone across the plains, no one in sight to hurt.

Bully in the Trees
 
Indiana cornfields leave so much 
   to be desired, and lately I’ve desired nothing
 
but clean sheets and pretzel bread. For a decade
   I was ruthless, took whatever I wanted:
 
last donut in the office breakroom, merged
   lanes out of turn. I stole my roommate’s 
 
change jar, sat on the floor of a Wells Fargo
   rolling quarters to buy an eighth. In this new year,
 
I promise I’ll stop being the loudest in the room
   like a bear ravaging a campsite just to be the bully
 
in the trees. For so long I thought my cruelty
   was the world’s fault, my stubbed toe blamed
 
on the coffee table’s leg, not my stumbling in the dark.
   Throwing every fish back to the river 
 
doesn’t forgive the hooked hole I caused.
   Once, I undressed a woman in the giraffe enclosure,
 
but maybe that was a Soprano’s episode. Once,
   my life was so ordinary I replaced it
 
with the things I saw on television. I ate fifty
   hard-boiled eggs. I robbed the bank and screamed
 
Attica! I stood in the trees cuffing the Nebraska
   suburb and watched my mother set the table
 
through the window. A porcelain plate at each chair.
   My ordinary life stranged by the window frame.
 
If I fall asleep before the credits, let me dream the rest.
   My pockets are empty, but the metal detector still shrieks.