Ian Randall Wilson

Unsleeping

A cloud passes overhead

bringing 30 seconds

of exceptional rain.

Not enough to raise

the failing reservoirs

more than an eighth of an inch.

The cat prowls

the hallway's outer borders

looking for some

kind of prey.

The floorboards are creaking.

The room shrinks.

Sconce light begins to show its bias,

its unnatural nature

and inability to do more

than make less dim

its tiny corner of the globe.

A river could not meander

less directly.

Enter spirit of the night.

At last the world turns

imperative. Now a dog howls

the way a dog

has howled for these

many million years.

Lights come up.

Words are shouted,

but the tone is very French.

Another cloud burst explodes

with the beat

of at least twenty drummers on the roof.

I'm awake anyway

watching the dark.

I have no exceptional worries

unless the dark begins watching me.

Ian Randall Wilson has published two chapbooks, Theme of the Parabola and The Wilson Poems, both from Hollyridge Press. His fiction and poetry have appeared The Gettysburg Review and Alaska Quarterly Review. He has an MFA in Fiction and in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. By day, he is an executive at Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Comments

Charles Rammelkamp

Doped with Religion, Sex and TV “Working class hero, my foot,” Darleen spat. “Pampered British rock star’s more like it. He don’t know nothin’ about no working class,” she sneered, “and that Jap witch he married. She’s probly the one who put them ideas in his head.” Darleen and I worked on the assembly line at the Capitol Records plant, putting fresh-pressed LPs into sleeves, the packaged albums into cardboard boxes, the boxes onto pallets for the forklift guy to take them away to the loading dock. “I used to like some of them early songs. ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night,’ but you can have this stuff. Working class hero! Who does he think he’s kidding?” I stuffed my impulse to defend Lennon, point out his poverty in postwar Liverpool, the broken family, the absent sailor father; mainly offended by Doreen’s naked racism, pitying her for the misogyny she’d absorbed from generations of farmers on the prairie. I was a college student, working part...

Karl Koweski

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

Kinnell's Book of Nightmares/Under the Maud Moon

Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully --I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every ti...

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