It is always the right time for some poetry, but as we ramp up production on the next issue of NDQ, this poem by Bobby Elliott from NDQ 92.1/2 felt particularly appropriate.

Inventory Control

When they finally let him go
he wasn’t supposed to be ecstatic

but he was. He hated his job so much
he sounded like Levine

at Ford Rouge— the grind
unbearable, an insult

he had to stomach for 25 years
while his siblings bought

beach houses and second cars, pitied
and hated my father at the same time.

He was going to be a painter,
at least that’s what he told me

growing up: he’d gone to art school
but dropped out a’er a semester,

threw away every canvas he’d ever
touched. Except for the one hanging

above the counter in his childhood
home. I don’t remember

what it was, only that I stood
in front of it every time I visited

after the divorce. A watercolor
probably, a landscape,

the only thing I want when he’s gone.

~

Bobby Elliott’s debut collection, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Cortland Review, Diode, ONLY POEMS, Poet Lore, and elsewhere.

92.1/2