So Far Away

Each evening, with his tie uncinched, the manager would lock
me in and make towards his Town & Country K-Car.

The punch clock in the stockroom was an Acroprint that sounded
like an old pneumatic nail-gun. A teenaged third-shift

menial in stonewashed jeans and high-top leather Reeboks, I’d sail
around the shop-floor on the fork rods of a pallet jack —

the checkout lanes and grocery aisles as empty as a Universal backlot.
At sun-up, all my jobs complete — undone and stoned

on black hashish — I’d crank the Dire Straits CD the sales staff always
used for demonstration — fly past bargain bins and end

caps like a hobo on a handcar in a silent era comedy. The drag-wind
in my hockey hair. The rumble of the wheels beneath my feet.

Winner of the 2019 Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry

Judge’s comments: From a raft of inventive, worthy poems I have selected “So Far Away” as the winner of the The Penny-Farthing Prize for Lyric Poetry. This is a poem of an exhilarative and fluid selfhood in the midst of work, a night job that affords the “teenaged third-shift/menial” movement, music, and a self-making solitude. I love the concrete language — pneumatic nail gun, pallet jack — up against the poem’s stoned-out rhythms and choreography. One senses from the title that the poem frames a highpoint — a long gone moment of the lyric “I” in its fleeting glory, “[t]he drag-wind” in its hair. —Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

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Phillip Crymble is a physically disabled writer and literary scholar living in Atlantic Canada. A poetry editor at The Fiddlehead and a doctoral candidate at UNB-Fredericton, he received his MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in Poetry Ireland Review, The New York Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. In 2016, Not Even Laughter, his first full-length collection, was released by Salmon Poetry. poets.nyq.org/poet/phillipcrymble / @phillipcrymble