Poem of the Week

To All the Donners Who Passed

D. A. Powell

The town I grew up on had

it all: drinking, gambling,

thieving, whoring: an embarrassment

of wretches. Like me. I once was

last chance for conveniences on

a highway littered with churches,

Church’s Chicken, and more churches.

Got schooled in Chinatown dice, Hong

Kong, Horse, and Liar’s, where at the

lake Insurance Jerry might blow

you or Lyin’ Don or Datsun Joe and

how to get picked up at the dirty movies

in the back of the dirty bookstore or

where to score and who to score and how.

But pretty soon we all got crabs from

Lyin’ Don or named as suspects when

they pressured Little David to wear

a wire. People say, Oh how lucky to

grow up in a small place where you

know everybody at the town pump.

Sweetie, can’t eat just peaches. And you

can only catch the same crabs twice.

The Yale Review · “To All the Donners Who Passed” by D. A. Powell

how did this poem begin for you?

Some seeds one carries a lifetime without knowing they’re going to sprout. I lived in a town named after a surviving member of the Donner Party, and I certainly thought about it a long, long time but never thought it was a subject to write about. And, really, this poem isn’t about that survivor, Mary Covillaud, but about the survivor I was, getting by with no sense, a queer kid in a rough town, depending, as Blanche DuBois would say, on the kindness of strangers. I guess when I realized that Mary and I were not so different—her eating her way to the top, me eating my way to the bottom—it all just sort of fell into place. Some details got changed, but not much. The town was surrounded by peach orchards. And the great outbreak of crabs happened after a massive levee break, when surrounding communities were flooded and evacuees were in relief shelters. Everything got passed around. But I was itching to get out, and did.

D. A. Powell is the author of five collections, including Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. In 2019, he received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco.