What to read?

I've got these magazines to choose from:

1. Horse Journal (the Consumer Reports of the horse world)
2. The Sun
3. Bicycling
4. Practical Horseman
5. Harper's
6. Garden & Gun (and it's the annual food issue)

I also went to a poetry reading last night as part of the Crossroads Writer's Conference & Literary Festival and heard these poets: David Bottoms, Seaborn Jones, Anya Silver, Kelly Whiddon, and Judson Mitcham. They're all included in Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club: An Anthology of Poets Writing in Macon and I just dive right into the poems, but the Introduction by Kevin Cantwell is also fascinating. The readings last night were great and the stories they told were funny and thoughtful and I just love poets.

Here, the first poem by David Bottoms that I ever heard, and the eponymous book, one of the first volumes I ever bought. It was selected as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the American Academy of Poets by Robert Penn Warren.

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump
by David Bottoms
Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride to the dump in carloads to turn our headlights across the wasted field, freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish. Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still like dead beer cans. Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow into garbage, hide in old truck tires, rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds, or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light toward the darkness at the edge of the dump. It's the light they believe kills. We drink and load again, let them crawl for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.