“Angel Mounds State Historic Site” by Norman Minnick

Image attribution: Heironymous Rowe at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Angel Mounds State Historic Site

On the grounds
of the Middle
Mississippian

Indian village
near ceremonial
mounds, occupied

circa 1500 A.D.
near the Ohio River
in what is now

Southern Indiana,
a young boy
from the city

kicks a Pepsi machine
for not delivering
on its promise.

(originally published in Folly)

Norman “Buzz” Minnick came of age in the 1980’s punk scene of Louisville, Kentucky, and was the frontman for the influential hardcore band, Bush League. His collections of poetry are To Taste the Water (winner of the First Series Award from Mid-List Press), Folly (Wind Publications), and a chapbook of poems entitled Advice for a Young Poet (David Robert Books). Minnick is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press) as well as Jim Watt’s landmark study of William Blake, Work Toward Knowing: Beginning with Blake (Kinchafoonee Creek Press), The Indianapolis Anthology (Belt Publications), and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (Kinchafoonee Creek Press). Minnick lives in Indianapolis.