The Poetry of Worthy Evans

“Stuck? Here is a little apartment where the coffee got cold/and the woman of his dreams sits up in bed/eating hangover ravioli while this man rewrites instructions/on how to load a website full of numbers and statistics/for this kid out of college he’s never seen./Look down into the stained white cup while the dog sleeps/and maybe the man reconsiders the love he thought was gone/because of roaches and dog piss, and let him write this boy/a new place home.”—Worthy Evans

Speculative Friction

By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—August 2025—Worthy Evans, the author of two books of poetry, Green Revolver (University of South Carolina Press, 2010) and Cold War (Third Lung Press, 2018), has been writing freelance sports stories for 20 years after spending a decade as a full-time sports reporter and editor. His poems have been published in several literary journals, and he is a regular contributor to The Voice of Blythewood and Fairfield County and their “High School Sports Report.” 

Evans writes, “Conversation poems such as ‘Icarus’ have been a way I get to an idea from possibly opposing viewpoints, with the ending being open, because, as in life, every outcome is open until maybe it isn’t. 

“The poet James Tate became a master of this craft in the 1990s. In poems such as ‘Economy’ and ‘How to Write Your Way Out of This Time,’ I enjoy spit-balling—writing in longhand anything that comes to mind while staring out a window, or looking at a parking lot, or having some image in mind. I find that my poems are best when they are closed in a notebook to germinate for several years, after which they undergo an iterative process of being typed and then typeset. The final phase is deliberative, mostly begun in figuring line breaks, or breaking out the massed paragraph of words into shorter bursts in an effort to see where the poem might be going. 

“At this point, I’m five or six years older than I was when I wrote each piece—six more years of perspective, six more years of experiences, and often what feels like an entire world that has changed in those six years. Changed yes, but also nearly identical excepting some fundamental subtleties that might be dismissed but also may have tilted the earth in an opposite axis or set our travels on a vastly different course with a change of a single degree/minute/second. 

“At the final stage, with the years past, a benign observation from 2020 might well come to a moving conclusion when the poem suddenly takes off from the aircraft carrier and flies on its own. (Or the heaping pile of crash material is taken below decks for observational conclusions that may go into working another attempt at launching a different poem.)”

Icarus
By Worthy Evans

“It’s the only name I know you as,” he said. “I thought of it
in this dream where I went into a stadium and tried to find
the one boy who was me,” I said. “You sure you weren’t
searching for Jim?” he said. “I didn’t really search, I knew
the boy was in there,” I said. “I grew up out in the sticks,
then struck it rich when some people decided we needed
to look at things in our hands when we cross the streets,”
he said. “In the dream the boy was not Jim, or Ernest,
or anybody, not Scott or Lucky or Dwight. He walked in
dressed in black and wearing a mask like everyone else,” I said.
“So you popped off the covers of your bifocals and looked
for the face you knew,” he said. “I’ve never been sure about
that face,” I said. “You must have seen the super-sized screen,”
he said. “People’s hats fell off when they danced, but mostly
the ones on the screen floated across to get their books and
sit down,” I said. “You must have waited for hours before
you got to see,” he said. “I parked outside the building and
overheard the security team briefing. People walked in for most
of an hour, each one fading into a brick wall until the body
in yellow closed out the entries and the security guards
pulled out their sandwiches,” I said. “When you saw your face
you must have been done. No pipe organs or airplanes,” he said.
“I was at the top of the crowd when I looked to see the boy
walking toward the ramp. When he walked off the ramp
I climbed up toward the fence and flew off to chase the sun,”
I said. “You must have maxed out for years,” he said.
“Centuries,” I said.

Economy
By Worthy Evans

Sales mask the need for chocolate
for coffee, for one day of dryness
in months-long monsoons
for breaking in machinated seats
of lavender, oleander, morning mist
fall breeze if we’re finding something
to present the sneeze at the TV
when times of tritium filling the living room
with signs of wellness stacks climb new heights
fast-walk great lengths in search of a place
to provide service, a body to deny rest
until the systems we made will be paid
in full, knowing our species that made-up
whatever-these-markers-are
knows that pail that catches the flow will not fill
for the holes our fists have punched through

How To Write Your Way Out of This Time
By Worthy Evans

I’m afraid I don’t really know how this works.
Sit yourself in a bus station and look at the linoleum
to the dust building up in a corner by the curved seat?
Where the man eats a sandwich he pulled from a vending machine?
Maybe you’ll come up with a line, any kind of line
that gets you on that bus or train, plane, merry-go-round,
the frequent flyer you are.
Stuck? Here is a little apartment where the coffee got cold
and the woman of his dreams sits up in bed
eating hangover ravioli while this man rewrites instructions
on how to load a website full of numbers and statistics
for this kid out of college he’s never seen.
Look down into the stained white cup while the dog sleeps
and maybe the man reconsiders the love he thought was gone
because of roaches and dog piss, and let him write this boy
a new place home. Boy or girl I guess, any kind of gender
a kid takes on into personhood, and maybe the urge is then
to write instructions for the man’s disembarking on a contractor career,
to set foot on some new ground old to him, billions of years of uplift
and folding in the making, soft patches to walk on for tired feet
on which to carry his sobering lover if she’ll still have him
and to whatever place around that will take a changeling
and his hangers-on, and once and for all leaving a hasty list
of instructions on yellowed paper on the chair next to yours.