LOYALITY TO THE NAIL

By Jack Joseph Smith

Up went the rusty nail through the wild wheat field And from a magic carpet kid I went like a folded short-shot young buck to the stubbles among growing ground It wasn't thick like pain under that wind moving the kernels across Metes's Farm It was thick rather like having to stop on your way through a dream I bent up close to my tennis shoe and pulled the board from my sponge foot The nail was shanty door old And the blood was going into the rust Like other blood against the past of its place between walls I was childless enough to murmur (seeped to its mark from chicken or cattle) Soon I popped the rubber from my heel And like the waste of a used-up cellar rag ...slipped off the sock The wound in the air... Then closed in a puff to a blur - 123456789 Not too long after I'd taken a suck at the puncture to some small avail When I found myself licking the nail I don't know if I wanted that bit of blood for luck or to live out the ambition of telling a told story for the first time for me with something on my tongue But when I got back to my suburban home; I told them it happened on a construction sight Because I thought you had to give nails up like dogs for testing

Original Scan

AI Interpretation

GPT

A boyhood memory of stepping on a rusty nail in a wheat field becomes a meditation on blood, storytelling, and the strange loyalty of licking the wound's source, ending with the child's lie about where the injury happened.

After stepping on the nail, the boy licks it and wonders whether he wants luck or a story to tell. He reports a construction sight at home instead of the wheat field. That change in his account matters as much as the wound: he has begun choosing how others will hear his experience. The page leaves a larger gap before the final line and spells the title LOYALITY.

Claude

'LOYALITY TO THE NAIL' recalls a boy stepping on a rusty nail in a wheat field, pulling it from his 'sponge foot', seeing his blood go 'into / the rust', and then 'licking the nail'. At home he claims 'it happened on a construction sight', believing 'you had to give nails / up like dogs for testing'.

The poem treats a childhood injury as a first act of storytelling: the strange loyalty to the nail and the lie about its location both come from wanting a story of his own. The misspelled title and 'construction sight' keep the voice close to a child's understanding. The separated final line lands as a deadpan explanation.