New Poetry with Audio!

Donald Revell
Stephen Burt
Paul Hoover
Jonah Winter
Cathy Wagner
Reginald Shepherd
Nin Andrews
Sophia Kartsonis
Sandra Miller
Joshua Harmon
Devin Johnston
Chuck Zerby
Sara Henning
Ognjen Smiljanic
Lance Phillips
Peter Drake
Kathleen Byrne
Ernest Hilbert
Garth Greenwell
Marc McKee

Criticism

Brian Henry on Kinsella
Gabriel Welsch on Northrop
Gabriel Welsch on Smith
Cecily Iddings on Ruefle
Christopher McDermott on Wenderoth

Peter Drake studies in the MFA program at The New School, New York. He is working on a collection of poetry called Sweetwater: Poems from the Desert and the City.

Forced Flowers

It’s late on a November evening, cold

and pouring rain, and I must escape

from this little box unit where I live

and walk out into the night like King Lear

with no daughters and an umbrella. I

make my way along a familiar street

and plough right through a group of couples

in serious raincoats saying good-bye to one another

with heavy New York accents. I trudge along

on a thick carpeting of leaves – so many

have come down in one evening it seems

against the principles of mathematics. A single

person here, a couple over there, and then

a corner store, the kind where New Yorkers

buy normal things no matter what the hour.

In front of it are row upon row of forced

flowers soaking up the cold November rain.

Some are in shades of red and yellow

that look autumnal; others are big phallic

things sporting bulbous heads ready to burst

with some unknown color, while in the back

row are tall skinny stems with white on top.

I want to call them hyacinths but am no

specialist in flowers. All I know is that I’ve

seen them somewhere growing on a hill

or clasped in a cowboy’s fist at the back

of a Mexican bus. I stand there, soaked,

eying the white flowers as an employee

keeps me under his watchful gaze.

I could grab a bunch and run or march

into the store to have a word with

the cashier about sacrilege. Instead, I

push my way through the heavily-sprung

glass door and gather up the voluminous Sunday paper.

Back outside I remain by the flowers

in the rain with the world in my arms.

It seems to be coming down harder now,

and I realize, as I head back into the night,

that I have withdrawn my objections.

The Making of Tennesseans

There are three types of people in Tennessee: slovenly, wild and gray.

The slovenly are slovenly in their being slovenly, becoming slovenly the more they place round hills in states shapes like parallelograms. They know full well there is a shamelessness and squalor in these round hills, yet they are comfortable in placing them where they fit. These round-mountain people do not care if other mountains are square. They dwell in shacks that crumble into rivers, unaware.

The wild are dispossessed of mountains, round or square. They roam the hills searching for what is not there. They shoot at things they cannot eat and eat things they cannot shoot. They wear no boots, only red, only yellow. For red and yellow are theirs to keep. They do not steal but claim their birthright in nothingness.

The grays are gray only if the sun shines too brightly, gray with an “a”, that is. They are grey with an “e” when it suits them. That is why and how they come into being grey with and “e”. They take delight in having made off with this language from the first colonists and using it as they please, with variations and misspellings which later enter into the academy, the Royal Academy of the Language of Tennessee. They alone know where it is and are in possession of the simple code by which the massive gates groan reluctantly open.

Lament # 531

A plain white sheet of paper

is the best for writing

a poem, a love letter

or a death note:

you fold it in thirds

and leave it on a pillow –

there’s a peculiar kind of thrill

each time you find one.

Lament # 553

There was a battalion

of handsome young

soldiers crossing

the desert, some

blond, others

with brown hair.

Kill us, the people

said. The soldiers

raised their guns.

Don’t kill us,

the people said.