Hey Cowboy

by Timothy Geiger

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I’m trying hard to find my way back home
but it’s getting dark and I’m not ready.

What led me to the playground
wasn’t the want to swing but my father’s temper.

He promised to give me something 
to cry about, the blur of his eyes gone wide.

Before that, he said the porcelain doll
was never meant to be played with. 

When I dropped her, we were climbing a cliff-side
somewhere in the wild, wild west.

Chased by desperadoes, we ran out of road
so, he must have known I was sorry.

Her body dressed in a laced linen petticoat,
hands and head in shattered bone china.

I slammed the screen door when I left
but thought better of it—too late.

At the playground there were no trains to rob, 
no painted horses or friendly Indians.

It wasn’t the first time I remember thinking 
the world was ending on those swings.

The harder I kicked, the higher I rose
only to drop down to the same earth— 

two blocks next to the alley from our house
always felt a thousand miles away.

When I leave home, he must think it’s for good
and lets me know it when I return.

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​Timothy Geiger is the author of the poetry collections Weatherbox, winner of the 2019 Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize from Cloudbank Books; The Curse of Pheromones from Main Street Rag Press; and Blue Light Factory from Spoon River Poetry Press. His newest collection, In a Field of Hallowed Be, was published in September 2024 from Terrapin Books, and received an Honorable Mention from the 2025 Eric Hoffer Award in both the Grand Prize and DaVinci Eye categories. He is also the author of ten chapbooks, most recently Holler (APoGee Press, 2021). His work has received a Pushcart Prize XVII and a Holt, Rinehart and Winston Award in Literature, as well as many state and local grants from Ohio, Minnesota, and Alabama. He runs a small farm in Northwest Ohio raising goats, chickens, ducks, turkeys and pigs. The proprietor of Aureole Press, a letterpress imprint publishing contemporary poetry, he is a professor of English at The University of Toledo where he teaches Creative Writing, Poetry and Book Arts.

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