Melissa Monroe

Hole-up

Every fingersmith
needs a drum where he can play
possum for a spell.

Say there’s a reader
out on you, and your choirboy
is about to spill.

One more flop, and you’ll
be doing the book. It’s time
to go on the hush.

With a good ink pot
you can just rabbit it off
and bingo—you’re low.

Fit your layoff spot
with a kiester full of cush
and a soft crumb-box.

Get a solid stooge
to see to the these and those,
the chuck and the slush.

Now you’re on the plush.
Unkink. Leave the ragged edge
to the whistle man.

My hole in the hub
was grade A cream—even had
a noisiola.

I’d invite my best
twist, and we’d make my diggings
a red-hot mushroom.

That was one sweet cave.
Sometimes I wished I could stay
dead there forever.

MELISSA MONROE teaches at the New School for Social Research and at Fordham University. Her poems and translations have appeared in various journals, including Parnassus, Ploughshares, and Raritan. A collection of her work, Machine Language, was published by Alef Books in 1997. The poems that appear in this issue of The Gettysburg Review are taken from a sequence inspired by David Maurer’s 1955 sociolinguistic study, Whiz Mob: A Correlation of the Technical Argot of Pickpockets with Their Behavior Pattern.

“Hole-up” appears in our Summer 2002 issue.

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