Acquaintances

poetry & prose by

David Sapp

~124 pages, $17 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: March/April 2026

An Advance Sale Discount price of $10 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $14.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.

David Sapp, writer and artist, is the recipient of Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award Grants for poetry and visual art. His poetry and prose appear widely in print and online venues across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. His publications include articles in the Journal of Creative Behavior; chapbooks Solitary Nature, Close to Home and Two Buddha; a novel, Flying Over Erie; a book of poems and drawings, Drawing Nirvana; and a memoir in poetry and prose, The Origin of Affection, winner of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award. A retired university professor, he taught studio art and art history for thirty-five years. He lives with his wife Heidi along the southern shore of Lake Erie.

Reminiscent of Sherwood Anderson’s masterful storytelling, David Sapp’s poems in Acquaintances strip away the fragile veneer of rural America to reveal the inner lives of his small town neighbors. With careful detail and empathy he elevates the lives of his fellow Ohioans struggling to survive. Sapp’s own revelations forge a connection to people whose suffering would otherwise remain hidden. These poems are a must-read in today’s divided world, a reminder of our shared humanity. ~Joan Baranow, author of Reading Szymborska in a Time of Plague

Accessibility is a virtue Sapp has in spades! There is a purity of sensibility in his poems and prose vignettes that illuminate life and lives, exploring lived experience in small-town America. He has a lightness of touch that doesn’t belie seriousness, a truth to feeling that shares human vulnerability, a breadth of empathy that throws light on the human condition. From these intelligent poems, you feel you could talk with him about feelings that matter. ~Nicholas Bielby

Naughty Boys

We were naughty
Precocious voyeurs
When we sneaked peeks
At Dad’s nudie magazines
Hair and smooth skin
Unfolded for me
In catalogues of mystery

We were naughty boys
When we happily shed
T-shirts shorts briefs
Ran naked in the woods
And like hairless
Little Tarzans swung
From wild grape vines

We were naughty
In our backyard tent
Ted Ben or Duke
Older amateur sodomites
Nearly/mostly/probably
Buggered me in the night
Too dirty for the priest
Wednesday at Confession
At nine I didn’t
Comprehend the sin

We were naughty
When I took another
Boy into my mouth
Only that once
For just a little bit
Years later I wondered
How we knew
How to do this

Billy

Aunt Evelyn’s boyfriend
Billy cornered a groundhog
Not far from the farm
With Grandpa’s dog
In a culvert that ran
Beneath New Gambier Road

I was an ungainly boy
A fidgeting puppy
Beguiled by the game
Who threw a few stones
At the beast in the hole
But quickly covered my ears
When Billy fired his rifle
A terse echo in the tunnel
The frantic scurrying stopped
But the sudden silence shamed me

Billy’s stunning purple
Pontiac GTO stayed home
On his tour of Vietnam
Sometime after Tet
I looked for him in the news
And wondered if he hunted
In the jungle with his gun
Or if someone sought him
Burrowing in the earth

Clare Short for Clarence

At sixteen I got a job at Tony’s Pizza to pay for gas, books, and records and to save for a camera. The shop was a tiny, white unremarkable cube on Martinsburg Avenue, once named “The Milkhouse” in the 60s where, like everyone else, we picked up milk and ice cream after Sunday mass. As a pizzeria it was filled with ovens, coolers, bags of onions, cases of tomato sauce, and the aromas of fresh dough, cheese, and finished pizza – the best in town. It was there that I became acquainted with Clare, short for Clarence. Clare was a shy, amiable Hotei, a pudgy man of about thirty or forty who lived with his mother somewhere in the neighborhood. Clare was labeled mentally retarded as in 1976 the kinder intellectually disabled designation did not yet exist. The word “retarded” was used clinically, matter-of-factly but also had derogatory connotations. On the playground children often called one another “retard.”

Clare always wore a bright orange hunter’s cap and a blue winter coat. Only on the hottest days did the coat remain at home. He stuck with long sleeves, though, with his top button buttoned. Never shorts. Clare was proud of his Sears bicycle, a streamlined model from the 1950s he’d had since he was a boy, tricked out with white wall tires, two lights, two mirrors, and a speedometer. Every couple of weeks he repainted it, covering all the original chrome in a thick red or blue enamel. We speculated the bike was held together with paint rather than welds.

A big kid really, Clare easily offered a wide smile and was willing to befriend anyone but was instinctively wary of everyone. I got the impression, after a few conversations, that the neighborhood boys teased or maybe abused him. When business was slow and Clare stopped in, Tony, the owner, a petty, insufferable lout who attended an obscure and highly evangelical church where people spoke in tongues, asked Clare questions to elicit humorous responses for our amusement. Tony thought Clare was always good for a laugh to pass the time. It was well known that Clare found body hair repulsive and regularly shaved head to toe. Occasionally Tony would say, “Hey Clare. Look,” and stroke his bear-like arm (not usually hovering over a pizza). Clare recoiled, distressed, almost nauseous in disgust. It was apparent that this was some kind of trigger for Clare. In the summer, Clare mowed a narrow strip of grass around two sides of the shop. Tony paid Clare with one can of soda. Just one. I wondered, why not two cans? How about five bucks to pay for some of Clare’s bike paint? Hell, why not a pizza with Clare’s favorite toppings? I never saw Tony offer one slice of pizza to Clare – as if his generosity would invite some kind of bad luck contagion.

Clare had his own peculiar way of saying things, his sentences pressed tightly and cautiously through his teeth. “Heey Deeve” meant hey Dave. “Bat-trees” was batteries. “Sheeze” was gee. “Shcooze-me-sumbuddy” translated as excuse me somebody. Occasionally he announced, “Heey Deeve. Got new bat-trees for my beek (bike).” After mowing, Clare downed his single soda in one long, noisy gulp and belched loudly. Once, this customary and predictable belch occurred with a customer present. After the customer left, Tony admonished Clare saying, “When there’s somebody here, say excuse me.” Thereafter, any time he belched, no matter who was around, Clare declared, “Sheeze. Shcooze-me-sumbuddy.” For many years, Clare’s phrase was fondly mimicked by those who knew him.

Following Clare’s “pardon me,” he nodded his head vigorously ten times to his left and ten times to his right. In other situations, if he was upset, there were additional nods with greater intensity. Clare exhibited several compulsive routines, but the head nodding was the most pronounced. At sixteen, I didn’t know what obsessive-compulsive disorder was (OCD was not yet used so casually and pervasively), but I recognized in Clare my own anxiety and my version of weird, inexplicable compulsions. Our rituals were a means to make sense of an uncertain world. When I got my new camera, I took Clare’s picture and he was thrilled, even hamming it up a little, nodding happily to the left and right between snaps. I still have the pictures somewhere, but I don’t need them to remember him.

Some ten years later, after Tony and Tony’s Pizza were long gone, after college and on the cusp of marriage, I happened upon Clare riding his bike in circles near the restrooms at Memorial Park. I imagined picnickers and soft ball girls were leery of him if they didn’t know him. I guessed Clare simply liked the flat concrete surface there. I heard that his mother died and he lived in a group home across town, an alien neighborhood with new kids and anxieties to navigate. He was much thinner, I thought gaunt, and now talked to himself in repetitious phrases. He looked weary, drawn inward. I called out to him, “Clare!” After completing three more requisite circles, he paused, looked up, recognized me, smiled, and said, “Sheeze. Heey Deeve.” And continued riding.