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Burma-Shave

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Burma-Shave was a shaving cream brand that advertised along American highways from the 1920s to the 1960s using rhymed quatrains posted in sequence on roadside signs. This poem pays homage to those signs—and to the strange poetry of travel, memory, and Americana.

They stood like rhymes on fencepost spines with wisdom scrawled in shaving thymes— a roadside gospel, terse and sweet that preached with meter, grit, and heat. Rosemary likes a clean-shaved man, if wooing her is in your plan. She’ll linger near and take your hand and proudly wear your golden band. Parsley hides beside the plate— the garnish mocked by those who ate. But lean in close— she knows the names of all who passed and played their games. Sage recalls those roadside lines— poetry caught between the pines. Sometimes sly and sometimes wise, a fleeting truth before my eyes. They’re all gone now fenceposts bare— but I still see those rhymes out there. Burma-Shave.

Copyright © | Year Posted 2025




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