Dan Carpenter

Blood

Dan Carpenter

Larry Smalls was a fighting man and sure as hell was built for it even now I'd kill for that body color of a bruise shape of a comic book superhero made not in any gym but down at the stockyards in the days they sent cows down a chute and black men brained them with sledgehammers

all day he'd do this work then he'd come home and fight but the muscle was wasted on those battles his fights were with City Hall, the Man, the System he took on police brutality with brute force of a voice unschooled, untrained raised to a quaint eloquence by rage over loved ones known and unknown herded, penned, branded and felled by detached deciders of their usefulness

some day, I figured, Larry might be among them for the moment, he swung his hammer no more conscious of some day than a child

Dan Carpenter has published poetry and fiction in Illuminations, Pearl, Poetry East, Southern Indiana Review, Maize, Flying Island, Pith, The Laurel Review, Sycamore Review, Prism International, Fiction, Hopewell Review and other journals. A collection of columns written for The Indianapolis Star, where he earned his living, was published by Indiana University Press in 1993 with the title Hard Pieces: Dan Carpenter’s Indiana. Dan has published two books of poems, The Art He’d Sell for Love (Cherry Grove, 2015) and More Than I Could See (Restoration, 2009); and two books of non-fiction.