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ISBN: 978-1-964277-80-6, 74 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Release Date: April 7, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $19/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Richard Cummins is a poet, essayist, and educator. Over four decades in higher education, he taught writing and literature and served in leadership roles, including college president and university chancellor. He is the co-author of a college writing textbook, has published numerous poems and articles, and has conducted research in such diverse places as IT shops, colleges, and apple orchards. Raised in Cincinnati, he has lived in Arizona and Washington state since the early 1980s. He lives in Seattle with his wife, historian Meg Woods. Their two grown children—both writers—live in New York City.
Richard Cummin’s Down To The Twisted Bone is “a love letter/through a strange slot,” lines, which inside the poem, refer to someone else’s microbiome healing your own. Sort of like poetry. Cummin’s poems are about a life cursed and blessed with considerations of the ordinary: how the old gestures of masculinity are now embarrassing, how families of origin become ghosts to the current family, just like Dean Martin. They offer a reflection back to 1933 Germany or a hospital room or the parking lot in which you are teaching your daughter to drive. “I stood for the wrong reason/in a room full of applause,” the title poem begins. And like many lines in this sweeping specific and communal collection of exchange, it resonates for the reader outside of the poem. ~Gale Renee Walden, author of Same Blue Chevy, and Where The Time Goes.
Rich Cummins is a poet of love and dignity, the grace of unknown intimacies and the lithe and lovely ways we are known by the beloved. When I enter the door each poem opens in this exquisite collection, I find myself in a house of many colors, profoundly refractive, multivalent, and of an architecture that is not only mystery but beauty, goodness, kindness, and humble strength. As people of the human community, when we encounter the joy of reading a poem by Rich Cummins, and the gift of reading this generous and grounded gathering of poems, we experience sanctuary. ~Shann Ray, American Book Award winning author of Atomic Theory 7, Balefire, and Sweetclover
for Sarah
“Don’t forget you have brakes,”
I tell my kid,
right after she hops the curb
like we’re in a car chase—
not a Honda Pilot
on a Sunday afternoon.
She wanted the empty parking lot—
safe, wide, boring.
But I wanted the road.
Because part of me believes
the world teaches better than I do.
And part of me just needs
to believe I’m still in charge
of something.
“I don’t like this!” she shouts,
as we screech to a halt
ten feet in front of a dog-walker
who looked like she’d just seen
her life flash before her golden retriever.
I think of the times
I’ve nudged, rushed,
pushed her forward—
to get in the car,
to tie her shoes faster,
to come on, let’s go,
as if childhood were a deadline
she was missing.
Once, when she was four,
the garage door lifted slowly
and she just stood there
gazing at the sky,
like she is meditating in a church
she isn’t ready to leave.
“Let’s go, babe,” I urged,
and she said, “I’m looking,”
with that little voice
that made me feel
like an amateur at fatherhood.
And I am.
Because all I’ve ever known
how to do is push—
into car seats,
into schools,
into the future
like it was something
she owed me.
Now she’s fifteen,
and we’re sitting in this car
my wife’s nail marks
still white in the leather
from the last practice run.
She’s trying to figure out
whether to go.
I’m pretending
I’m not terrified
of how far she’ll get
once she does.
And for a second
we’re just two people in a car—
her learning to start,
me learning to stop—
both of us staring
at a road
I can’t take her down.
listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go
~e.e. cummings
There is a man I know
who prays before he eats.
He wants god to taste everything.
He says it plain.
Like black coffee.
For me: not the beard on a cloud
but the 360-degree hum
that holds everything—
including the monkey
who insists he’s me,
who won’t stop singing pop songs,
or chanting the morning headlines,
even for nirvana.
He is how I forget to listen.
I remember again
when a crow drops to the blacktop
with nearly soundless flutter.
So, I say to the monkey:
Come in.
But sit down in the back.
I stood for the wrong reason
in a room full of applause.
Five hundred clapping,
and me rising like yeast.
Turns out some guy near the dais
had just donated a kidney
or saved a busload of orphans—
something nobler
than surviving another day
of my own white noise.
Driving back, I shook
like a dog unsure if he’s headed
to the park or the vet.
At a red light,
I yelled at the mirror.
Not metaphorically.
Just: What the actual hell, dude.
I feared stolen valor—
a blogger outing the guy
who hijacked a standing O.
But the real gut punch?
Imposter syndrome
because I’ve been a poser.
Not the Catch Me If You Can way—
forged checks, jump seat pilot, bar exam.
More like the guy at wine tastings,
asking where the beer is.
The guy who mumbles a few busted lines
in a room full of Spanish speakers,
then nods his head for an hour.
***
No speech. No slammed door.
Just a sincerely puzzled look
from the driver’s seat.
“You don’t believe half of what you’re saying, do you?”
I’ve been seen like a CT scan
cutting through glibness
down to the twisted bone.
And that’s the moment.
When the mirror gives up
pretending it doesn’t see you
in front of the sink.