Poem of the Week | October 05, 2026

Trenna Sharpe is from Tennessee. She lives in London. Her work has appeared in the New England Review, the North American Review, Sinister Wisdom, The Tangerine, and others.

“Hello, Bruce Springsteen” by Trenna Sharpe is our Poem of the Week.

Title Image: Spring (Spring in the Garden) (1927), Wanda Gág

***

Hello, Bruce Springsteen

The subway in July is a womb,
and Bruce, I tell you what,
I feel alive. I wear black to work,
but inside I am a confetti parade
splitting open—
tourists lined up screaming
red-faced and flinging
beer into the summer air.
I am flying. I am shining.
I am frying in the street in the heat
of a thousand love songs.
Bruce, remember that Super Bowl halftime show
where you slid across the stage
and wracked your nuts on national TV?
Let your be-denimmed crotch lead the way, Bruce.
It is powerful and impervious.
Finally I remember all my previous
loves for what they really were.
My mother was right, and
my mother was wrong,
and I am too. I never believed
in hell, Bruce, but I will step lightly
into Heaven with every waking yawn.
Spring in Tennessee is a body-crackling stretch
we all share. These days, I am of the notion
that even I can be as gay as I want to.
Justin is dead, but I see him in all my poems.
Look, there’s where I found him
after thirteen years apart: the crumbling parking lot
of JJ’s Bohemia in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
A drunk in her cigarette-Southern accent
saying, “Y’all should kiss.” “No, I’ve known
her for a long time,” he said.
“That’s my brother,” I wanted to say and still do.

***

Author’s Note:

It was July the very first time I stepped down into the New York City subway. I’d never felt a close heat like it. It felt like me and everyone else down there were dissolving at the edges and blending together, like the air had given up on keeping us apart.

My stepbrother died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2020. His name was Justin Earle. You might know him as Justin Townes Earle. After our parents broke up, I didn’t see or speak to him for years, until he came through town to play a show before he got big. I went down early and walked up to him in the parking lot to say hello. He could’ve done anything — Justin was volatile at the best of times — but he grinned big and brought me in like there was no time between us. Justin sang “Racing in the Street” by Bruce Springsteen that night. His bandmate busted a beer bottle against a wall and had to play the whole show with a chunk of glass in his eye.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t deserve to grieve for him like I do because I wasn’t his real sister. But whenever I listen to the Boss sing, “Tonight my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea / and wash these sins off our hands,” I think of Justin. And I hope he feels free.