LeRoy Sorenson

Poetry

Main Street Rag published LeRoy Sorenson’s poetry collection, Forty Miles North of Nowhere. His chapbook Railman’s Son will be published in 2021. He won The Tishman Review 2019 Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. He was also a finalist in Naugatuck River Review’s annual poetry contest. His work has appeared or will appear in The American Journal of Poetry, the Atlanta Review, The Cider Press Review, Crab Orchard Review, Comstock Review, Nimrod, The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and other journals. He lives in St. Paul, MN.

Hometown

Take my hometown where boys become drunks and girls become escapees from bad marriages, too many children. Take my hometown where you learn to speak— shithead, dickhead, motherfucker— and study, on paydays, lines outside liquor stores. As a child, I kept a leery eye out for everyone: the fat mailman; the holy roller preachers; my drunk uncles. An eye out for the fast hand of my father. For the town drunks, the next day only a gin bottle away. Dragged out of my mother at the local hospital, the hospital with the Jesus Saves signs, crucifixes in every room. The town a mini-Pittsburgh, a hole carved out of prairie sludge, so American the streets burned my eyes even at night.