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Summer, 1961
Joseph Hutchison


Dad’s gruff push mower
taught me the worth of real work:
sweating summer long
for damp handfuls of quarters—
tickets to Bruce Wayne’s Batcave.



Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published 20 collections, most recently
Under Sleep’s New Moon; The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; and Marked Men. His poems have appeared widely in journals—most recently in Pedestal, THINK Journal, and Poetry Salzburg Review—and in numerous anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.

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