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I’ve Stayed in the Front Yard

May 12, 2021/ Brendan Nurczyk

[poetry]

I’ve Stayed in The Front Yard

after Gwendolyn Brooks

i.
My father never drank except at Christmastime, I’ve
never seen a brown bottle drain until I was seven, stayed

at my grandmother’s house and knew the skank smell of alcohol, in
winter where cigarette smoke looks ghostly, the

ash tray a black patch of night, he sat on the steps in front
of the garden shed, and I watched breathed pain billow across the snowy back yard

and came back to my grandmother’s warm kitchen, where I could not smell all
the taint of sin that was roadside addiction and played on the crime shows my

mother watched on the TV, the dark living room in the night all my life.
A couple winters later we would come back and I

would be older now, a black Wisconsin sky drove an insatiable want.
At midnight, my aunt sang and poured drinks, a

curious child standing in the doorframe for a peek
at the golden liquid that bubbled to the sky, at

midnight, a champagne glass of orange juice was fitted into my hands, the
thickness of the pulp, I felt twenty-one at twelve, drinking leaning back.

ii.
what is it that real men do, I never knew how to be strong and
bold and to wear

fire on my beating chest, the
flame that does not ash. I screamed into the night to sound brave

and heard no return, no world shake in fear. The real man in me pulled on his stockings
and left the room, vaulted the fence of

the front yard to the back, the unknown, the night-black
I folded and faded and bit unknown lace.

I heard the night owl’s coo of disapproval, me—the collective bad, and
yet I picked myself off the dewy ground and through the mud and grud to strut

my first steps across newfound grass, and down
to the stream to wash my dirty shins, “I am almost sixteen and I want to see everything,” the

unfounded land, to be carried by new waters, vault down untouched city streets
my mother will tell me “you’re too young” with

love, but I have freshly-coated war paint
and I ride on

the air, the leap of faith, the hunter’s and hunted’s prowl on my
face.

Author Headshot

Brendan Nurczyk is a high school sophomore from Jacksonville, Florida. He has been published in his school’s literary magazine Élan, has been recognized regionally for his poetry and fiction by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and will attend the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio this summer.

School Lunch Archive

  • 2021
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Friday Lunch Blog

Friday Lunch! A serving of contemporary essays published the second Friday of every month.

Today’s course:

Behind the Eight Ball: How to Become Homeless in the Richest Country in the World

June 13, 2025/in Blog / Valerie Nyberg
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Meeting My Child Self at the Trauma Play

May 9, 2025/in Blog / Gale Naylor
Read more
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Products of Our Environment

March 14, 2025/in Blog / Mitko Grigorov
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More Friday Lunch Blog »

Midnight Snack

Take a bite out of these late night obsessions.

Tonight’s bites:

Dig Into Genre

May 23, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Lauren Howard
Read more
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The dreams in which I’m (not) dying

April 25, 2025/in Midnight Snack / paparouna
Read more
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On The Map

March 28, 2025/in Midnight Snack / Ariadne Will
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Amuse-Bouche

Little bites every third Friday to whet your appetite!

Today’s plate:

Tale of the resistant apple tree

June 6, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Tahar Bekri, translated by Patrick Williamson
Read more
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Talyshi Wall Graffiti and other poems

May 30, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / Ghazal
Read more
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we don’t spend our lives in the belly of the fish

May 16, 2025/in Amuse-Bouche / translated from French by Gabriella Bedetti and Don Boes
Read more
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More Amuse-Bouche »

Word From the Editor

The managers of Lunch Ticket all agreed that issue 26 needed to have a theme, and that theme had a responsibility to call for work relating to what we are seeing in society. We wanted a theme that resonated with Antioch University MFA’s mission of advancing “racial, social, economic, disability, gender, and environmental justice,” and we felt it was time to take a stand…

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