Michael Todd Steffen helps coordinate The Hastings Room Reading Series and frequently publishes articles about new and established poets on the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene website. His poems have appeared recently in The Exacting Clam, Ibbetson Street, The Red Letters, and spoKe. Boris Dralyuk (managing editor for Nimrod Journal) writes, I have read [Steffen’s] poems with enormous satisfaction. His lines are supple and wear their unmistakable wisdom lightly.

Michael Todd Steffen

Sunday Evening

Even the criminal in me feels
unwanted on a Sunday evening
with the neighbors and their families
circling in the houses’ windows.

And it’s not the pizza they’re eating
in the blue light around the television.
I only want to crouch there with them,
small and blind in the service of an ideal

which would lose its beauty the moment
it were spoken. That’s why we hate
time for bed. Why mom turns her head
to kiss us goodnight. Why I’m here instead.

— Michael Todd Steffen