Apple Blossoms

It’s spring break here in little Morehead, Kentucky.  Our basketball team made a cardinal and a melting wax sculpture cry simultaneously.  The rain is holding off.  The trees are blooming pink.  A good time for some poesy.

Apple Blossoms

Hair buds surviving on a desolated scalp picked clean for a grandfather’s sins serve to curl a finger at the mirror into eyes that simply want an honest spring of tulips and arachnids but will only ever find the misdirection of a western sand dune in the crevices of an abandoned belly button still warm from the tether to a grandfather’s daughter who thankfully knows nothing about apple blossoms floating over an empty bench in a poet’s backyard and what they say about ambition, how it’s fleeting like a widow’s peak.

-SLC

Get Out of Appalachia (Temporarily)

I went to Montana in the past week to deliver my (former) roommate to his patiently waiting wife in Bozeman.  The three of us (we were joined by another of my roommates) drove from Lexington to Bozeman in thirty hours, which was intensely amazing, and I went west of St. Louis for the first time in my life.  It was an eye-opening and invigorating experience that brought to mind two slightly stereotypical ideas about Appalachia natives – “Appalachians never want to leave home” (shown by the old phrase “you can take the boy out of Appalachia but you can’t take the Appalachia out of the boy”) and the contradictory idea that young people have to run from Appalachia like rats on the Titanic (since, you know, there’s not one slice of potential here blah blah blah).  I agree slightly with the former and damn to hell the latter.  This trip caused my desire to experience the rest of America, and the world, to erupt like Independence Day, but even then, I can’t shake the desire to return after these travels and use whatever experience I gain to appreciate these old mountains and do something significant in them.  Here’s a prose poem.

Get Out of Appalachia (Temporarily)

I discovered, lying on the side of the highway in Nebraska, just at the edge of a corn field that reminded me of the days in Genesis, their endlessness, complete with a serpentine irrigator that stretched between horizons, a piece of paper presenting a sketch of a goat’s head.  Day-old flecks of ice made its beard and stains of starched mud colored its horns.  And perhaps it was a lack of sleep, a thirty-hour road-trip only halfway through, or the lingering effects of an energy shot of tainted apples, but I swear that goat spoke to me and said two things.

First it said “I am not a goat,” and I thought of a Belgian pipe.

Then it said “What I really wanted to say is this: to fill your stomach, you need to eat everything.”

I ate the paper in strips and took a drink of coffee and looked west into the haze of lingering dawn and watched the ambitious sun rise in the rearview mirror.

*Note* – WordPress is not conducive to my exact visual formatting, so this poem looks different on an actual sheet of paper

-SLC

Two Poems on Antilachia

Here’s a couple of poems from a new phase of work I’m developing based on the potential fusion of prose and poetry.  Each poem in this little cycle has two versions – one “pure prose” and one “line break” version.  I’m posting the “pure prose” versions.  These are also the first two poems I’ve written specifically with the idea of “Antilachia” in mind.

Antilachia I

The only way to love is to accept hangnails, to suck on them until they go soft, to pull them off with your teeth and put them in a glass jar, to build a hybrid car with your collection, to drive towards sunset in a hangnail car.

Antilachia II

The first step in recovery is to realize you need recovery.  Take a mound of dirt and rub it between your hands until it turns to water.  The first step in recovery is to realize you want recovery.  Boil the water under a microscope and watch the bubbles speak.  The first step in recovery is to realize you deserve recovery.  Say the bubbles’ sentences to the nearest bag of highway garbage.  The first step in recovery is to realize everyone deserves recovery.  Tell the garbage “The sun does strange things to plastic, too.”  The first step in recovery is to realize you are everyone.  Rub the bag against your sunburned neck.

-SLC

it is snowing and these birds are crazy

I’ve only written two poems in the last 3+ months due to my extreme focus on a thesis of experimental memoir and a novel that’s eating through my mind and down into several notebooks.  This is one of those poems, written after such a large binge of prose and during Morehead’s “warm up” round of snow last week.

it is snowing and these birds are crazy

and this squirrel loves it
in a tree stripped of leaves and throbbing
with small pebble berries that it attacks
like so many flies on a dying deer
sprawled in the ice of a highway,
this squirrel cares nothing
for mittens or coughs and these birds
are circling and perching on cold fingers
and picking at the snow for shriveled worms,
they’re staring at the squirrel
and at me – maybe we’ve overstepped our bounds,
the squirrel and i, maybe they were saving
those frozen berries for a cobbler,
maybe my cigarette offends them,
maybe these birds are highly curious
as to how the snaps of my coat dangle
like mistletoe, maybe they want to kiss me
or maybe they’re assholes, and as for this squirrel
reaching far for berries with no shred of dignity,
it is the one i would kiss for its oblivious eyes
and i’d say to these birds fuck you, south’s that way

-SLC

What Do You Make of All This Snow?

So I’m happy to be posting things after a long stretch of                                        .  There’s a lot of exciting things going on right now with literature and plenty of blogs to explore.  Thank you for spending time with us.

I don’t want to say much about this poem, in terms of process or meaning, because I had really just intended to send it to a friend who’s working on an M.F.A. in Minnesota–not that the degree’s going towards a Master of Fine Arts in Minnesota, but that’s the state where he’s doing his degree work.  I wrote this about a month ago, so the weather conditions have changed slightly and I believe he made it back to his home state recently.  I dedicate this poem to him.

Poem for Rick in Minnesota (Antilachia #7)

I seem to get nowhere praying,
which is why I avoid a den of lions
whenever possible.
I hear it’s already snowed up there.
My wife is dreading the crawl to work
on the Interstate in those kinds of conditions.
Down here we’ve only had flurries,
but in every flurry I can see a caged white lion.
I am so unlike Robert Mapplethorpe,
whose collection on Lisa Lyon warrants your attention,
Rick, if you find life
to be without warmth or form.
I have no courage, I dread my audiences.  And so
things remain much the same for me down here,
only by the time you’ve finished reading this
I will be much older.
The white lions will have piled,
and I will be inside taking pictures of myself
for no one.

–Prewitt

one last whimper

Holy shit!  It’s been a while.  I think there’s a fairly simple equation for our absence:  (grad school + newlyweds + moving + thesis work) x (senior year + GRE bullshit + magazine editing + other thesis work) = busy as all get out.  Sorry about that.

Hopefully, though, we’ll be posting much more in the next little bit, as things wind down and the holiday rest periods approach.  Here’s a little taste of something, a poem from my time in Hindman this past August, one of the several I’ve been slashing at drastically in the last week or so, and one that deals with that lovely subject of death and tragedy.  I thought coming back with something bright and happy would be too much to ask.  Hope you enjoy.

one last whimper

the sky streaks down upon itself
and lands in a field and invents flames
while i sit safely on the sofa and
my parents discover the silence of tears
in waiting rooms filled with november rain,
a river invades a man’s basement
and kills a city while i grow anxious
over the loss of electricity,
i touch a liquor stained window gently
as my dog breathes one last whimper in a highway
and watches the truck thunder on,
one last kiss with a sky of fire,
oh what a sensation that must be

-SLC

mr. still’s chapel causes a realization…

I spent the first week of August at the beautiful Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky, for the Appalachian Writer’s Workshop.  It was a great time, and there’s a really amazing sense of egalitarianism and equality during that week – everyone hangs out together, everyone washes dishes (faculty and students alike), everyone attends evening faculty and student readings.  I came there burnt out on a monotonous summer, a stressful life, and left invigorated, rested, and ready to kick ass with words.  The only regret I have is that I was pretty closed off for most of the week.  My anxiety disorder (apparently this has become my own personal health-complaints blog) rears its head in crowds and foreign surroundings, and this was one massive, week-long crowd of mostly strangers.  I didn’t really get a chance to open up until late Wednesday evening and most of Thursday, and that’s a real shame, because I really loved everyone there and wanted to get to know them more.  Alas, my jackassery can only be regretted, never changed in hindsight.  On the plus-side, though, a fair amount of people picked up The Gospel of Playing Dead so they must not have been completely disgusted by my glass case of emotion.  (And that was some self-promotion – if you want your copy of Playing Dead, by god let us know and we’ll get it to you)

So here’s a poem, in my “new / throwback” Stern-like style, that was inspired by my choice to be a ghost.

mr. still’s chapel causes a realization on the severity of my anxiety disorder

i am a gargoyle amongst gadflies
at the site of james still’s grave,
the lonely pillar of smoke
in between classes of bonfires,
as fingers slip around my throat
and make flirting a death penalty,
a man in the prison of swollen ankles
while making an impression on ice skates,
a novelist’s wet dream, the silent machine
turning gears through rust at the sight
of yet another refusal to make phone calls,
one more chance to miss a hand
and slap my nose, i am at war,
an enlarged heart and a mouthless mind,
each armed with a shotgun
directed at my tongue, that innocent child

-SLC