Smelly Andy
Andy smelled like piss.
Every Monday night at AWANA,
in a brown brick Baptist church
a
huge
sterile
angular white cross
hung
on
the
front
facade
in a tiny sleepy farming village near the I-96 corridor
somewhere between Lansing and Detroit,
he showed up
torn Detroit Lions t-shirt
heather grey sweatpants
stained dishwater yellow.
And I vowed never to wear sweatpants from that moment forward.
All the neat Matthews and Billys from respectable families
and Carries and Sarahs from Sunday school
drifted past him in half-circles
like he was a cold spot
in the room
where the Holy Spirit
wouldn't settle.
And even as they avoided him in wide orbits,
you could feel the guilt radiating from their shoulders
as they held their breath during game time.
Already learning the choreography
of how to love your neighbor.
And I learned it too.
We all did.
Some of us spent years unlearning it.
Most didn’t,
and you can tell
every time they vote to cut school lunches.
I’ve recently been reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island of the Mind, and poem 22 “Johnny Nolan has a patch on his ass” stuck with me.
Something about Johnny’s small, human vulnerability felt instantly familiar and it stirred memories from my own childhood in the rural midwest bible belt. I began thinking about the quiet cruelty of children, how easily it is learned, rarely questioned, and how it often hardens into adulthood. Ferlinghetti’s poem is tender, nostalgic, relatable, and empathetic, without overtly moralizing. I hoped to capture similar memories from my own childhood in a similar manner.





‼️‼️ So good! Relatable and visceral. I love the opening lines.