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Where Poems Come From
Tim Gillespie

Twelve years old, riding my bike
down a small hill, I saw that
my front wheel was wobbling.

Thinking it would be a grand feat
if I could tighten the butterfly nut
while still coasting, I took my right

foot off its pedal, not stopping,
and carefully tried to push up
the nutwing with my toe.

But somehow the tip of my Chucks
slid a half-inch between spokes,
instantly jamming the wheel to a stop,

causing the bike to pivot over it,
cartwheeling me onto the pavement.
Miraculously, there was no

major damage to boy or bike, but
the driver who came to a screech
behind me, after checking to see if

I was okay and helping me untangle,
got back in his car, then couldn’t help
himself, burst into laughter and drove

away in tears. Some days
at my writing desk I feel the way
I did that day, gingerly sticking

my toe into the whirling space where
ambition, folly, disaster, miracle,
tears, and laughter spin. And this

is what lands with a splat on the page.

—
Tim Gillespie is a veteran public school teacher in Oregon, buoyed for almost forty years by the work of helping young writers find their voices. His poems have most recently found their way into the pages of Windfall, Fireweed, Passager, Rise Up Review, Cloudbank, and Timberline Review. His collection Old Stories, Some Not True was published by MoonPath Press in 2020.

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Have you read these poems:
Drifting by John Milkereit
In My This Time by Richard Eric Johnson

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