Dan Albergotti

Listening to Heavy Metal, 1981 & 2024

            on lines from Cheap Trick and Cameron Winter

God, it felt good to get beyond the reach
of that house at seventeen. I’d pull out
of the carport, feeling a weight lift, and
drive toward a world I felt like I could take.
That felt like life. Felt like I could live it. 

My mother’s dead now, father too. They’re where
I’m going, that undiscovered realm. Yes, I’m
headed there, and so are you—we’re going
just like everyone. No comic books there, I
suppose. No midnight movies. Now I can’t
help but wish I was still trapped and could keep
escaping. Tonight, I want more than anything
that lost feeling of starting up my life, not
just the car’s engine, that joy of driving even
those few miles toward what whispered, This life’s for you.

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Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) and Candy (LSU Press, 2024), as well as the chapbooks Of Air and Earth and Circa MMXX (Unicorn Press, 2019 and 2022). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Shore, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review and other journals. His work has also been included in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize and other anthologies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in Tampa, Florida.