Ode to a Skatepark

Will Cordeiro

Delinquents slouch along the brink—fall
in among precast concrete, rebar, barricades 
by halfpipes. Blood smears, knee shards.  
Skinny riffraff. Chubby imps with blue balls, 

dimples. Last-picked punks. Inked castoffs  
sporting peach fuzz. A pack of scrappy pip-
squeaks pocked with zits, stiff with pit stains.  

Dorks fondle deck ribs, squander sliptape.
Slaphappy upstarts who break for the light
-hearted boy, an amped young buck: king-
fisher levitating flush over seafoam as fame,

ever rash, flashes its rush. A choked-up trick,
he’s popped the nose, hovers over his swiveled
truck. Scabbed elbows level as if they’re wings, 

he drops (unflappable) this kickflip. Sticks it
in an eyeblink’s stopgap, glides away, a piece
of cake. Idyll of excess and ruckus. Reckless,
a top still spinning at which the others gape. 

Will Cordeiro has work published or forthcoming in 32 Poems, AGNI, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, and The Threepenny Review. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street. Will is also coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.