Skip to main content

Scott Ferry

sparkle

there was a time when i wouldn’t notice the flash and weft of sun on water / back when i didn’t need to notice god in the wind / back when i didn’t need tangible evidence / back when i could just be unholy walking with the thunder and the broken psalms // but now i know i am broken and faithless / now i must collect each strand of light as it falls and weave it into my splayed chest / a threaded rosary keeping all the brightness in my blood / i must do this because i have to laugh with my children / because i have to show them there is music on the black waters / that there are sapphires on all of the graves


sin

i am falling asleep without my cpap / the middle of my body keeps opening until the feeling of being without a shell becomes soothing / the blood as a mist the bones crackling into a fine chalk / the presence inside of me now something singing / the words now a sloping breeze over the bed / but when i try to fly up the charcoal castles and canyons i fall jagged back into an asphyxiation / a seatbelt stinging sharply against my clavicle / a blush of epinephrine / i am alive again and the first thing i feel is shame

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His latest book is a collaboration with Lillian Necakov and Lauren Scharhag titled Midnight Glossolalia from Meat For Tea Press. He also has a collaboration titled Fill Me With Birds with Daniel McGinn looking for a home. More of his work can be found @ ferrypoetry.com.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Weldon Kees

Along with my Jack Gilbert kick, I've been reading the poems of Weldon Kees as well as the secondary material (very little of which seems to be available in book form), which is too bad. There's a pretty good book called Weldon Kees and the Mid-Century Generation: Letters from 1935 to 1955 , which is structured in such a way that it seems more like a biography in letters. Normally, a writer's letters are collected and footnotes are rare except to sometimes identify confusing timelines. Robert Knoll includes more narrative about Kees than it does letters. I think otherwise it might not have made a full book, otherwise.Very interesting anyway. Kees seemed poised for mainstream uber-success at 41 years old when he simply disappeared.  His car, with the keys still in it, was found near the Golden Gate bridge, but with  no trace of whether he committed suicide or simply ran off to Mexico, as he talked of frequently in his last years.  James Reidel's book Vanished Act: t

Charlie Brice

Immortality You make sure to eat Grape-Nuts every third or fourth morning, cover those non-nut nuts with blueberries because they have gobs of Omegas and no Theta’s, floss every other night to inhibit heart infections, use mouthwash several times-a-day to ward-off armies of oral bacteria, walk the dog every night for a mile, eat an orange daily, take your Lipitor horse pill, your Enalapril, Verapamil, Singulair, Multi- vitamin, Allegra, and carefully cut your Metoprolol in half and take it for your arrythmias, and you do all this instead of church, instead of fingering rosary beads and telling yourself that somewhere near our galaxy’s big black hole Jesus and Mary are floating around without oxygen masks or spacesuits, and it’s in this way that you avoid the anvil of disease, the miasma of malaise, the numinosity of pneumonia—in this way you make sure never to die, you make sure to live forever and ever. Amen. Charlie Brice won the 2020 Field Guide Poetry