Waiting for my foot to ring by Bob Hicok

By Sarah Portner

I really enjoyed reading this poem. I loved the imagery, and how you could see the different things the author was talking about, and how I had done some of the things that the author was talking about like; taking apart the tv and or can opener (I have never taken apart a tv, but my friend had an old can opener in her basement that we took apart. We couldn't get it back together.) or placing hamburger on your dog's nose and telling him he has to wait before he can eat it (my dog was never really good at this one.)
I liked the word order he used for a lot of his lines. Such as: "I was told about a poet who wrote a poem the day/his wife was put in a box and given to the ground/ like it was Christmas. The person telling me/ had on a green shirt on which trees of a different green/were imprinted, he thought the poet was sick/and I thought the poet had a mind that only lived/in his hands." I love that last part. The idea of having a mind that lives in your hands.
I like how there is a comparison between the author taking apart a can opener and or a tv and his father's surgery. How you can see the parts of his father laying on a table and the parts of the can opener. And how the author always forgets to a small piece to put back in and how they will be taking out a piece of his father's colon. Yet, the author was never deprived of soup or westerns, and in the same way he won't be deprived of his father either. It is an odd way of looking at someone going in for an operation and I really liked that about this piece, how it played with words and ideas.