A Poem by Joey Minutillo: Secretary, Vermont

Some men wearing flannel and hats with white brims
shovel gravel into piles. Other men lay thin layers of
mortar between asymmetrical bricks with the dull
edges of their trowels. The mazes of mortar are mirrors
to the one-lane roads constructed by the same flannel men
weeks prior. Houses are still pine skeletons with
wind whistling through their bones.

Children stand on piles of pea gravel, tugging
floppy checkered hats to their ears. Strong gusts of wind lift
their arms. Their mothers stand in half-circles, drinking from
insulated brown thermoses, keeping one eye on the children
sliding down the piles on their bottoms, kicking up ghostly
clouds of gray dust, their other eye on the masons raising their
trowels like pistols.

The dirt becomes littered with bootprints and the outlines
of shovel heads and the handprint’s of children catching themselves
at the bottom of the gravel piles. Mothers huddle closer together
as the sun falls behind a tree. The warmth from their cinnamon cider
breath the only touch of comfort. One child walks into the frame of a
conduit and looks up into the sky, begging for his finished house
to have a roof of stars.

Copyright 2008, Joey Minutillo. © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.

Joey Minutillo graduated in 2008 with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Ball State University. His work can be found in Literary Tonic, Writing Outside the Margins and was one of the editors in The Broken Plate, Ball State's Undergraduate literary magazine. He has literature forthcoming in No Posit Volume 3. In December 2007, Joey released his first chapbook, New Ancillary Barbarism and is currently working on a new chapbook which is due out in July. In his free time, he enjoys Volkswagens, collecting video games, film theory, and professional baseball.