Dean Marshall Tuck

Breakup Mixtape

1. Deep cuts, album filler, the songs between

2. better songs, b-sides, hidden tracks,

3. throwaway ballads, late career stuff,

4. “here’s one from our new album,”

5. sitdown songs, the go-take-a-piss songs—

6. we were the tunes you talk over,

7. the fast forwarded, the forgettable,

8. the fans-can’t-even-sing-along songs,

9. the never-requested, uncollected, bootleg

10. lost tracks of, and now, we are

11. singles.

Providence

~a Golden Shovel after A.R. Ammons

We used to put on Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” to
fall asleep, we’d say, but somehow we’d only stay
awake longer, to hear the rainy cymbals yield to bright
climbing soprano sax riffs, erratic and spasmodic as
butterflies in Central Park, suspended in sunshine. If
this track was just a bit longer, if the night was just
a little less sweet, a little less still, I thought,
we might live forever in these two chords, of
-fering up our bodies to the night, to the earth–
we dissolve like rain into concrete. Love requires
this impermanence, this disappearing, and only
life, the briefest solo over the sweetest groove that
musicians ever laid, only life chases away the nothing,
and in this moment, our old apartment, we stay, stay, stay.

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Dean Marshall Tuck’s forthcoming novel Twinless Twin (University of Nebraska Press, 2025) was chosen by Jason Mott as the winner of AWP’s 2024 James Alan McPherson Prize for the Novel. Recent poetry can be found in Rattle and Witness Magazine. Online: deanmarshalltuck.com.

“I’ve been wanting to write a poem about Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ for years, and I’ve also written several Golden Shovels working with the A. R. Ammons poem ‘Providence,’ and then one day those things collided. It’s too perfect that his poem has fourteen words which gives this thing the loose appearance of a sonnet. That said, I’m probably not done writing about all these things—mixtapes, the Coltrane song, ‘Providence’….”