Dangling between
Mom and Dad,
a ripe fig ready to drop,
we walked
from ride to ride
at Clementon Park:
Tea Cups, the Tile-a-whirl—
roller coaster snaking
toward blue blank space.
From fear to joy
and back. What else
to know but this?
Brian Patrick Heston grew up in a lower working-class section of Philadelphia. His full-length collection, If You Find Yourself, won the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Prize. His poems have won awards from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation, and have appeared in such publications as the Southern Review, Aesthetica, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, Missouri Review, Hotel Amerika, Poet Lore, Ghost Fishing, and an anthology of eco-poetry published by the University of Georgia Press. Currently, he teaches literature and creative writing classes at Truman State University.
