Shout Out to Ben Sullivan

I received my alumni magazine the other day. Hoorah! ..... Actually, I was not anticipating anything cool and unusual to be published between its covers. There was a familiar-looking guy on the cover - long hair, plaid shirt, faded jeans - but every guy at Texas State looks like that, so I paid no mind. Then I flipped open the mag ... lo and behold (by the way, why can you never use lo by itself?) the man on the cover was a peer of mine, Ben Sullivan (Sully). Is it weird that I'm writing about him and hardly know him? I don't think so. I just want to take a few minutes out of my day to pay him some respect.

Sully and I took a poetry seminar together my last semester. He is a fantastic poet, and I always thought he would "make it." Some way, some how, he just has a gift. Here's the link to the article: http://www.txstate.edu/rising-stars/ben-sullivan.html.

Here's a run-down:

Sully was assigned a research paper in his class about baseball and American culture, and he chose to write about Lou Gehrig. What was supposed to be a research paper turned into a story about Lou Gehrig's life/battle with ALS. What's unique is that Sully's mother died from the disease when he was eighteen, and he intertwined his firsthand experience with ALS into the biography of Lou Gehrig.

Now, I never knew any of this in our workshop together. All I knew from his poetry was that his mother was sick ... and I couldn't even be sure of that since not all poetry is biographical. The poetry that seems biographical usually is, though. I spoke maybe ten words to him total. But I always admired him. I think it's very cool to see a peer writer get recognized. The workshop environment is just very intimate, and even if you never hang at the bars with your classmates, or whatever it is you do to be best buds, you know them in a way that their family could never. When you write, and not just write, but open yourself for criticism from fellow writers, you really bare everything, you open some of the darkest, most vulnerable corners of your life. You write about things you could never tell the people closest to you. So in a way, I feel very connected to Sully, even though I didn't immediately recognize him on the cover of the magazine.

Anyway, his poems were so well-written that I kept them ... you know, just in case. I feel a sense of pride, really. Read the article, it's very interesting. And I'm including one of his poems without his permission. Hey, at least he gets credit. And I got his back in a court of law. But I want to give him some more publicity because I have mad respect for him and we went through workshop together and I'm totally proud of him as if I were his sister.

Untitled by Ben Sullivan

A mother and two sons make Alabama
with soccer games and Chinese food
sometimes fight with lots of church.

Then sick came into her, to what was
ours, to what we owned, and stayed.
Step father for a mother and two sons.

A lingering drunk with a leather belt
pulled tight, welting fresh skin, taught a
stupid mother with stupid sons blisters,

picked a stick and beat Alabama bloody
and sent a crying mother to freezing Massachusetts
And two stupid sons to scorching Texas

Where they fry their egg rolls in rancid milk
And feed pinches of soccer to the pigeons
While their churches whisper thumbtacks and shoelaces.

Then what was ours was no longer ours but hers
And hers alone. Her and Massachusetts and the sick.
It ate her legs, then arms, then throat, then the rest.

Texas smiles her crooked yellow teeth
And serves warm guacamole as a show of good faith.
Two stupid sons scrub their hands at the kitchen sink.

I'd love to include more - I have three more - but that's pushing it. So I bid you adieu. Congrats, Sully!