Sheldon Lee Compton

A Nostalgia
I used a towel that I had used the day before, and the day before that. When I covered my face to dry my beard I inhaled the scent gathered inside the towel. It smelled like a basement in Virgie. The basement was always cool, a steady 65 degrees during all seasons. Must or mold, a mixture of oil and grease, draped the air; floating invisible was wood still hot from sawing and the scent of that warmth. I finished drying my beard, thought of Ancient Egypt. There’s a town about 100 kilometers south of Luxor called Qurta that is home to the earliest signs of an intelligent, ancient band of Egyptians. There are no great pyramids, only flatland that, all at once, rises up to a sheer wall of earth. If you climb this wall of earth, what you find are carvings of animals into the stone face. Many are of bulls. These are the early sketches that would show up later in places like Luxor and Cairo. These are the odd reverse-echoes moving over the land like a nostalgia, like a small scent that opens up a civilization.

Sheldon Lee Compton is a short story writer and prose poet from Kentucky. He is the author of seven books, most recently the short story collection Sway. His work has appeared in Always Crashing, Best Small Fictions, Degrees of Elevation: Stories from Contemporary Appalachia, People Holding, and New World Writing, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at Concordia University, St. Paul.

Comments

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful. I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose. I was lonely. I was too loose. I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you. If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me

Live Nude Poems

Search This Blog