Gozzlebeck’s By Terry Jude Miller

near the on-ramp

of I-10 in Crowley, Louisiana

we unload our band equipment

into the back of Gozzlebeck’s

not the real name of the bar

but an homage to the owner

who has an eagle-beak nose
it’s a dump—a dive—a place

in a Bukowski poem—but we

get fifty bucks a piece and free

beer—so we play this place

about once a month—get hit on

by the sixty-somethings who

know the night is a long cold

road that never ends—Gozzlebeck
tells us to watch for the hole
in the stage floor—where 
our drummer sets up

in the middle of our first set
a rat pokes his head out of the hole

and quickly disappears—we laugh

and say he’s on to something

outside as the 18-wheelers whisk 

by on the long dark road into

the night—our music seeps

into the stars above the bar’s
aluminum roof

Terry Jude Miller is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet from Houston, Texas. The recipient of a plethora of poetry awards including the 2018 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize, the Maxwell Prize, and the Inez Grimes Award, the Georgia Poetry Society 2018 Langston Hughes Award, a Juried Poet for the 2011 & 2012 Houston Poetry Festivals and winner of the Global Peace Poem competition of the 2012 Tyler Peace Festival, his work has been published in the Southern Poetry Anthology and in scores of other publications including anthologies of the Austin International Poetry Festival and the Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Harbinger Asylum, Postcard Poems and Prose Magazine, Everyday Poets, the University of Houston's Bayou Review, Ancient Paths, Orbis, Stepping Stones Magazine, Furnace Review, Shine Journal, Blue Skies Poetry, Survivor's Review, Live Oak Review, Lamplighter Review, Bijou Poetry Review, Chaffey Review, Foundling Review,  Houston Literary Review, Boston Literary Magazine, the Edison Literary Review, and the Birmingham Arts Journal. Miller's books of poetry, are titled: "The Day I Killed Superman", "What If I Find Only Moonlight?", and "The Butterfly Canonical" and can be purchased at barnesandnoble.com and amazon.com.  He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of Texas, the Gulf Coast Poets Society, and Poets Northwest (Houston).  He is the creator of the Texas Poets Podcast. Terry is a retired professor of eMarketing and held an Innovation Fellowship at Kaplan University.