Mantis 20 (Spring 2022)
New Poetry
Spencer Hupp
Specimen Days & Collect
Moments at the Brooklyn Heights Café
An American ideal:
Musing on an orange peel,
I fist my pen
Like Walt Whitman.
Mossad held Gaza under siege,
Administering glyceride and boxes of sultanas.
Whitman’s “The human heart is everywhere.
You have an inkling of this war.”
Whitman, stow-away into the story
Of the American Civil War, his “morning glory”
Was kissing soldiers on the mend;
An infallible kindness.
SPENCER HUPP is a poet and critic from Little Rock, Arkansas. His poems, essays, and reviews appear in The Sewanee Review, Raritan, The Cortland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, and The Times Literary Supplement, among others. Hupp was most recently named a semifinalist in the 92Y Discovery Contest. He currently serves as an MFA candidate and graduate instructor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.