Thirst is Joseph Hutchison’s third chapbook collection.
Title: Thirst
Publication Date: 1984
Length: 16 pages
Binding: Saddlestitched
OUT OF PRINT
From the book:
THE CROSSWALK
It’s a lightpole at a city crosswalk. Over the grit, someone has scrawled with a black magic marker: JESUS, SAVE MY SOUL. Traffic like cold wind. You lean into it, the way you lean a while later into the chilly fluorescence at your desk. That beetle glimpsed as it vanished into a sidewalk crack — with a start, you realize it lives there. A tremor takes your hand like cicadas grinding up time in the willows. Weren’t there days when horizons, at dawn or at dusk, shone like a Bible’s gilt edge? Then where did these nights come from? Nights you dream of nothing but the crosswalk down-town: how the signal keeps changing — WALK, DON’T WALK — though no one is there to cross and the street itself is empty.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
