Iron Pennies
poems by
Michael Brockley
~76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: August/September 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8.50 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $12.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
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Michael Brockley is a retired school psychologist who lives in Muncie, Indiana. He worked for 33 years in the rural schools of northeast Indiana and won the Indiana Association of School Psychologists’ 2016-2017 School Psychologist of the Year Award. During his career, Brockley collected 800 conversational neckties. He chose a necktie to wear by pairing it with famous historical or humorous events, notable birthdays, and whatever might be celebrated on a National Day of calendar. Since retiring Brockley has accumulated a collection of aloha shirts, and he occasionally writes poems about an alter ego he calls Aloha Shirt Man.
Iron Pennies is a scuffed, tender ledger of small-town American life where loneliness is its own weather, yet a collection luminous with mercy for those who walk alone. Brockley writes to reckon, with fierce precision catalogues everything he loves –Hostess pies, minor-league ballparks, jam sessions, Aloha shirts – and everything that elicits ache: unrequited love, westbound trains, Wile E. Coyote. His poetic “ardor and bravado,” lucky us, braces us to the redemptive strangeness of the world. ~Dawn Lonsinger
Michael Brockley’s new collection Iron Pennies brims with noir tropes, Hawaiian shirts, Blue Highway diners, and panoramas from the open road. These well-crafted prose poems showcase the loneliness of America but also one man’s quest for connection. Savor Brockley’s wit and surrealism, his regard for our overheating planet and cleareyed rejection of cruelty. This book will warm you like a wedge of rhubarb pie or a baseball game in August. ~Karen Kovacik
Michael Brockley’s stunning debut Iron Pennies comes alive in inventive prose poems built on astonishing imagery and surprising turns, “not knowing where the brakes” are. Tender and funny, with a contagious candor that will have you rooting for the one who “knows the plane is overloaded with mercy, and climbs aboard again,” Iron Pennies sings without apology this most inalienable truth: “I choose the god who chose not to believe in me.” ~Rosebud Ben-Oni
Horse Operas
In the early days, after wrapping up Guided Muscle or Scrambled Aches, I hung with badasses. Lee Marvin and Jack Palance. We chugged tequila, worm and all, between bouts of lying about outdrawing Sammy Davis, Jr. during Hollywood’s annual quickdraw hullabaloo. Word on the Western sets was that the Duke used camera tricks to clear his holstered Colt. That figures. After I hinted at wanting a big-screen gig, Palance hooked me up with the cattle calls when Ford needed some trickster coyote howls. Bonafide. I scampered up those buttes in Monument Valley like an ACME heat-seeker was on my tail. Back when I was nimble as a Mojave Desert Romeo. To get in character I pretended I was serenading Penelope Pussycat or imagined staking Pepe Le Pew onto a bed of red ants with honey sprinkled over his mangy carcass. Up in those hills, my ardor and bravado echoed off the cliffs. Until Strother Martin wouldn’t come out of his trailer without the gunslinger’s sidekick found in a long pull of straight bourbon. Of course, most of my lines got cut. In ‘62, Marion Morrison whined that a wailing coyote distracted from the drama when he shot Liberty Valance dead on the streets of Shinbone. The Duke hid in an alley, as I recollect. After that debacle I crept back to being that scrawny bird’s nemesis full-time. To Beep or Not to Beep. Buffalo-swallop. These days whenever some hot-shot films a horse opera in Monument Valley, I drive Penelope out to those mesas. And wait. Until the stars fall asleep.
Maureen
She knew which balloon to buy when Woolworth’s offered banana splits for the price on the token hidden within the party favors. She had a knack for choosing thirty-nine cent bargains. I had a paper route at the top of 8th Street hill. She babysat for a family in the boondocks near the end of my route. Saving her money for college. On Valentines Day, I’d give her sweetheart sugar candies and one of those small cards with a puppy-eyed Cupid on the front before scoring sandlot touchdowns she never saw at Claypool Park. Before I left to play football with her brother, she’d quote Mae West. Too much of a good thing can be wonderful, she’d say. I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. Come up and see me sometime. While her friends screamed, Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the Beatles, she had a thing for duets. Simon and Garfunkel. The Righteous Brothers. Phil and Don Everly. I sang “All I Have to Do Is Dream” to her after my voice quit breaking. When I could imitate Don’s baritone. She listened, while her eyes made darkness seem sacred. While looking jaunty in a red beret paired with a turtleneck sweater. As a freshman, she joined the first German class our high school offered. The next year I took neuling Deutsch as a senior. By then, she knew I’d bottomed out of Drivers’ Ed. Like everyone shaking it up at the armory’s Saturday night dances, she believed I couldn’t tell the accelerator from the brake. Only one of my memories of her is true.
The Speed Dating Blues
Women with hoop earrings & demure watches perch on folding chairs facing away from the setting sun in a conference center great hall. They wear teal & burgundy dresses from Nordstrom’s. Hose & heels. Long tables decorated in a cupid & valentine motif separate the women from the men who squirm in a row of chairs with a view of strip mall stoplights. These men are neither stockbrokers nor surgeons. Number 17 owns a Pizza King. Fifty-one says he is a nurse. They mute their conversations in the presence of rivals. No one wears cologne. Or perfume. When the hostess rings a school bell, the men greet the women with an awkwardness born from canned tuna & potato chip suppers. Each offers a condensed life to the woman seated across from him. A hope. Everyone keeps notes on scorecards, placing a check mark beside the number assigned to the woman who preferred Pierce Brosnan as James Bond or to the man who played tight end on a high school football team. The women doodle flowers on the margins of their scorecards. Faint stars by the numbers of the men they prefer. But this batch of men are retired record store clerks with a closet full of aloha shirts and detectives stymied by too many small town mysteries. One talks about dinosaurs & shares pictures of his Kawasaki Ninja. Another has memorized a poem flush with blue highways & rock-&-roll anthems. The cards are dark with et ceteras and asterisks. The spaces where risks become futures remain blank.
