Smelly Andy

when i was a young warthog. oil on paper. 2023.

                      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.