POEMS BY WORTHY EVANS
FROM GREEN REVOLVER (Columbia: USC Press, 2010)

Outer Marsupials
I must be peculiar for a secret agent.
I sign my name to just about every document
that came under my hands.  Receipts, checks,
handbills, hotel registers, all of them I mark,
Mr. Lawrence Delmore. People know me as Larry.
I speak openly of civic engagements and have never
dodged a camera or a reporter. I make dutiful
notes and send them to reporters so they can
determine my whereabouts and extrapolate my
doings. I make it obvious that I am not
a secret agent. Every newspaper reports
my coming and going. I do have my
enemies, but they know me only as Walter Ng,
38, of Nantucket. Targets for assassination know
about the marks I make on them, but they
invited me to their islands anyway,
and I kill them.When in Rome
I woke up on a flimsy bed and looked
right down at the wooden floor. The room
looked nothing like my apartment, which
was where I thought I had landed the night
before. A pickaxe, a small barrel of nails
with a hammer resting on top of it was across
from me. A roll of canvas, a stack of pulled-up
planks were leaning up against the wall where
the iron bed was. I looked at the black and gray
striped blanket atop the mattress, the filthy red
union suit I wore, a dusty mirror hunge next to an
oil-papered window. I found clothes, a worn-out
pair of dungarees and a green gingham shirt. I dressed
and pulled on the only pair of brogans in the room.
No sense in wasting time, I said. I looked into
the mirror and greased my hair down. Today is the big day.
I pulled the knuckleduster from my pocket and knew
what I had to do.