Alienated from poetry? A guest post by #BLauthor11 Andrew Rihn

"Injured Brain = Total Abstinence,"
mixed media collage,
by Brett Stout

I haven't written a poem in roughly two years. As strange as that sentence is for me to write, it is equally strange to see my poem “Tow Truck” appear online. It is the last poem I wrote.

It is strange because two years on, I'm really happy with the poem. At the time, I was writing a lot of poems about alienation: alienation from God, alienation from each other, alienation from ourselves. Most of my poems started from images, from things I've seen that could be excavated as metaphors. In this case, the idea for the poem began by seeing tow trucks that appeared to have crosses on them, and considering the phrase “my cross to bear.”

I was also looking at spaces where alienation became somewhat literal: the space between customer and cashier, between the artist and model, or in the case of “Tow Truck,” the space between driver and passenger. I'm interested in the relationship between intimacy and distance. It is intimate to sit next to someone in the cab of a truck, yet the relationship is quite distant. Proximity may not be fulfilling, yet sometimes it is all we have.