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    Run the Red Lights
    Run the Red Lights
    Run the Red Lights
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    Run the Red Lights

    By Ed Skoog

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    About this ebook

    • Skoog’s work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares.

    • Skoog is a rare voice from the periphery of academic circles. He’s taught in both colleges and high schools, and he’s led workshops for graduate students as well as the homeless.

    • Skoog plays a mean banjo, and there are lots of musical references throughout the book, from the Grateful Dead and the Macarena to Alex Chilton.

    • Because Skoog has lived in so many places and has become active in many different artistic communities, his work has a wide geographical appeal.

    • Ed Skoog worked at “The World Famous Topeka Zoo” all during high school. He wanted to be a zoologist when he graduated, but by the time he left college, he was considering a career in politics after a stint as the student body president.

    • Also worked in the basement of the New Orleans Art Museum before Katrina and has a facility with and knowledge of the world of outsider artists.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateJan 13, 2017
    ISBN9781619321670
    Run the Red Lights

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    • 5/5
      I hope I live long enough to visit Ed Skoog park on a trip home to Topeka, in the shadows of the abandoned West Ridge Mall on the median of Wanamaker Road. In fact I may plant a sign there myself.

    Book preview

    Run the Red Lights - Ed Skoog

    PART ONE

    Being in Plays

    Ethics are learned from who you sleep with

    the first few times, and theater is sex,

    almost. Being in it, I mean, and being young,

    with a lot of group undressing

    and silence in darkness, chaste

    permissions of the cast party,

    spiked punch in the recreation room.

    I was always cast as Old Man

    with tennis-shoe polish for white hair

    and lines drawn where my lines now are,

    forehead haiku, the eyes’ briffits,

    and parentheses around the muzzle.

    I guess I miss it, achievement’s sense,

    the way a show’s run ends

    and everyone knows it together,

    a social pain, like the death

    of a popular imaginary friend.

    When lights between scenes dim,

    I like to see actors take props offstage

    or team up with stagehands to move

    the built elements of our fantasy.

    I hope they keep going, and sneak

    some of the properties home to mix in

    with their private dramas. I pass theaters

    the way I pass churches, but like

    better this foldable theater

    half-constructed in the mind,

    sometimes thrown away

    along with the day’s receipts.

    Nothing’s lost. I carry my own

    props in—red telephone,

    bowl of apples—and then with me draw

    back into the unseen.

    The Children’s Theater

    One morning I’ll leave the house naked

    and stroll down the street, fun for everyone

    to be relieved from shame for a moment,

    nourishment for my inner scold.

    Most people I’ve seen, I’ve seen clothed.

    What anyone wore I don’t remember,

    while the people I’ve seen nude

    I remember everything about, or can I

    draw the first nipple I kissed by video light

    or the cyclorama of middle-school showers

    all of us in awful proportions, half-kid, half-dude.

    Classmates with the largest dicks

    have been first to die, by misadventure,

    cancer, problems of the liver. Still,

    most Swedes debut sexually at fifteen

    and in China it’s twenty-three.

    Everyone in this floating world is naked.

    I’m tired of having a body. The mind’s a bore

    too, with its video light. On their patio,

    my neighbors talk about their bodies

    in low voices while the bug zapper

    administers its anonymous questionnaire.

    Last week I went for an HIV test

    at the free clinic below the repair shop

    for musical instruments, also

    housing a children’s theater,

    and I could hear them improvising

    as I waited twenty minutes for my blood

    to signal the presence or absence

    of antibodies. The woman who

    administered my test and an anonymous

    questionnaire did not believe my story

    though it was both rehearsed and true:

    the gas station in Nevada, the basin

    where I washed up after hours dazed

    on the road bloody with a stranger’s

    inner life covering my hands,

    my face before I noticed. I remember

    going to the traveling show of Sweeney Todd

    in which my cousin Stuart, trained for opera,

    submitted his throat to the demon barber’s

    stage knife, sending his body down

    the ingenious chute, where Angela Lansbury

    baked him into pie. His only sung Sondheim

    was a lavabo and a fancy chair. Lavabo,

    from the Psalms: I will wash my hands

    in innocency: so will I compass thine altar.

    But it just means a sink to wash the blood.

    Whose blood? You don’t get more naked

    than blood. At the clinic, mine dotted

    a simple device to rehearse its speech.

    I answered her questions of history, sexual

    partnerships, gender, gender preference.

    Whether rough or high, or had traveled

    to any of the

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