the Pictures No One Saw: Poems from road

Thirty years behind the wheel. More than seven hundred poems. Not one of them ever sent to a publisher. Tros Mann has driven local and over the road for three decades. Somewhere between a loading dock in San Jose and a truck stop at three in the morning, he started writing down the people he met. He kept at it for more than twenty years, writing at his kitchen table at 3 a.m. or in the back of his sleeper cab. These are the first hundred. They are not the kind of poems you have to decode. They rhyme. They have people in them, and they go somewhere, and they end. A bartender's regular who stops showing up. A man tracing the dash between two dates on a headstone, wondering what fit in there. A pile of rags on a floor that turns out to be a war hero. A soldier who came home and found the war had followed him. A husband watching the brass bell across from radiology, hoping his wife is the next one to ring it. There is grief here. His wife Beth died in December of 2024, in their home, next to the Christmas tree. There is also a rooster who pecked the wrong woman, a twenty-pound dog who takes four fifths of the bed, and an open letter to every loader who ever stacked a pallet of eggs sideways. In the plainspoken tradition of Robert Service and Edgar Guest, written by a man who has actually done the work. Poems for people who don't usually read poetry. Poems from the road, meant to be read out loud.