Jeff Neidt divides his time between teaching creative writing and running his own freelance writing business. His has taught at schools and universities in the Twin Cities and Germany and at the Loft Literary Center. Jeff's own writing has appeared in publications including Forge, Alive, Artist-At-Large, The Reed, The Hill, Manitou, and St. Olaf Review. His first book, a collection of Minnesota trivia, was published by Blue Bike Books. In 2011, he was awarded an Honorable Mention Prize for the Loft’s Mentor Series.

Two Poems (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

Ode to Wal-Mart

O' you of discount and neon. Your position on the Mount Rushmore of Capitalism rooted as old growth forest. Such a temple of consumerism has never been erected. Your stores, salt pillars of material goods, rise like phallus from this virgin soil. You provide the teat for the great community suckle. Guiding star, beguiling mirage, you call town folk with the scent of a deer pinched in heat. You of unbridled lust, you wear your greed like skull chains. You greet my presence with transcendence, like a soul waiting for a ferry. The soul I am pretty sure I lost at the sliding entrance.

From fishing flies to ferret food, and all other manner of Mammalia, only you offer all I need to raise, bait, catch, filet, and memorialize my pet. Your carts, canoe-like in their efficiency, glide over the silm of waxed light. Silk Traders be damned—your lanes stretch like country highways. I could watch my dog run away for three days down your aisles. Be it July's pudding-like humidity or January's ice-shackle it matters not: Your air is alarmingly conditioned, sweet as drug money.

You display your wares with the pride of a newly minted father. On aisle 34D alone there is enough triumph and pomp to bring a man to tears. O' How I've searched with compass and flashlight your cavernous halls. Your employees, priapic in their rise to greet me, finger me toward goods nourishing as tapeworms. You modern gypsies of trade. Purveyors of plastic, pusher of poly—you find a way to sell what no one knows he needs. And it's all on sale. Your halls could land an aircraft, host the Super Bowl—and that's just the grocery department. I could complain; I could protest, but there are avocadoes for 28 cents a pound, and I've got guacamole to make.

At Takeoff, I Realize

there is a polite shaking here. Energy latent
as warmth in spring. Tension and rumble
as the wheels drive us toward our runway-narrow dreams.
But what I'm really trying to say is, right now,
as we build speed, stumbling toward
babies in cribs and playgrounds, seats upright,
tray tables secured and locked, I find myself
loosening my seatbelt and staring
out the window as the ground rushes by.
Now I'm smiling at the blur of landscape
and uncertain why. But I know
later you will find out things about me –
things I'd rather you not know –
that my toes are larger than I'd care to admit,
and I am as indecisive as spring rain.
But right now, at takeoff, I realize
the conditions are brilliant, limitless.
And I can see myself whole
against the cloudless sky.