Mark Conway’s first book of poetry, Any Holy City, (Silverfish Review Press, 2005) won the Gerald Cable Book Award in 2004. His second collection, Dreaming Man, Face Down, won the 2009 American Poetry Journal Book Prize and was published by Dream Horse Press in 2010. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Bomb, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Agni, Boston Review, Verse Daily, the Grolier Poetry Prize […]
Divinity is contagious, some sticks to me, like dust, or drugs. It drips down, slow as love – dumb and second-hand. I was His favorite. He preferred me to eternity. But He was painted in. I pain not. Nor shall I pant, or want. I am nothing but a word. […]
Off day, the prairie sill at evening, choked with mustard, thistle, the coarse meadows failing at twilight. Then father went out. To see early stars turning on their bitter wheel, the small flames making the lowland evening blacker. I’m old, he said to the night, […]
As white shutters and as white As tourniquet, As black As creeks, As numerous As glass, the window shattered, kindly, to save the fist As groan, as famine feeds thin dogs, the father falls As pinetrees into pitch, as tongs hammered […]
He counts on me like he counts the corn, worrying down to Harvest. While Father sleeps, the moon gets fat on cheese. It lasts all night, her little head on fire, still eating. She’s like me, I heal well, too. When Father leaves for town, there will be a silver flask, […]
What were those days like? Remembering is like remembering white, or water. It’s another resemblance, the libraries packed with broken metaphors, book after book filled with “water is like…”, “white as…” When Alexandria caught fire, the librarians burned like candles, like suet. As for the manuscripts and their similes, nothing was […]
from The Book of Isaac, Burning I will let him come freely into my presence and he can come close to me; who else, indeed, would risk his life by coming close to me? —Jeremiah […]
Why do we stay here, sleeping on a dwarf dream, the subtitles shaky, waking to fish for loose change? I’d like to go inside now where it’s warm and you never know what’s next. Under the Big Top of my mobile home, a survival kit’s included. It’s a real time-saver, what’s more, it […]