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Vivian Shipley’s 13th poetry book is Hindsight: 2020 (LaLit Press, Southeastern Louisiana University, 2022). Previous books won Word Press Prize, CT Center for the Book Poetry Prize, Paterson Poetry Prize, New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Award and CT Press Club Award. Individual poems have won Poetry Society of America’s Lucille Medwick Prize, Robert Frost Foundation Prize, William Faulkner Prize and USC’s Ann Stanford Poetry Prize. Shipley is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus. Her website is Vivianshipley.net

Vivian Shipley

The Light is Green; I Can Drive Away

Car door open, knees jutting out,
a man is selling The New Haven Register

at the State Street ramp. I have a red light,
but he does not get up to offer me a paper.

Smoking, he leans on his thighs.
Orange safety vest, his bare arms

are a macrame of faded burns, cuts, welts,
not from barbed fences or baling hay,

but his overalls do sag with dirt that could
have come from suckering tobacco

in Kentucky fields. This man might be
my uncle, my cousin. I cannot stop staring

at his thick brown hair, furrowed cheeks
that arrow my heart back into Appalachia,

to our cabins in its hollows. I can picture
him walking Connecticut streets, probing

seams for coins buried in couches
left on the curb. If I had the plastic bag

of water bottles I leave in a Shop Rite
basket for people who will bend down

to pick up a nickel, I wonder if this man
would bother to redeem what he can?

— Vivian Shipley

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