Andrew Kuhn

WHY I LOVE BEING A COP

The sap, the suspect, clasped wrists
upturned in his lap, split lip burning salt,
slumps unmasted, unspooled in a pool
of spilled lies, gasping, gaffed, almost
grasping what’s lost but he still sees
the sloop’s sleek aft deck, the tray
of black plums, the pulse in the throat
of the spun-gold girl unclasping
her top and bending, supple, to
somebody else as the hull slips
past overhead, the sails fill and
he sees where he is at last and
how lost and his only spar is the one
you’ve tossed and he’d better grasp it


Andrew reads "Why I Love Being a Cop":



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Andrew confesses: "This poem started with words clustered for sonic affinities and spun itself into a sort of hardboiled sonnet. I have never been a cop (and would have made a poor one) but here try to imagine having close-up power over someone who deserves what’s coming."

ANDREW KUHN's poems have appeared in Common Ground, Able Muse, The Mailer Review, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, So It Goes, and other publications. His collection of interviews of twenty-one eminent poets, How a Poem Can Happen, was published in 2017.