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

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...

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...

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.

Live Nude Poems

Search This Blog