Of salt’s place in ancient Roman currency, paid out in rough burlap bags to soldiers bearing the weight of empire, I’ll speak for a while tonight. For as long as I can recall some scrap of trivia, I’ll utter circa, anno domini, I’ll trace the bloody lines of Caesars and serve garum, a sauce of […]
The world is filled with those who want someone else, just as the world is split in halves, or hemispheres if we want the word that says it with a measure of beauty. Most times, we do. But tonight, what you get is halves. Tonight what you get is another unanswered question. Something like, why […]
The phone is never for me except for when it is and so most days I ignore its digital trill before someone apologizes to the air for dropping my blood on the floor, could I please entrust one more vial to their care. Or it’s the synthetic coo of a woman I almost believe could […]
You are always eighteen or married or both, carrying inside you a surgeon or a singer growing away from you like a little cloud, and you have just escaped from the leprosarium hidden beyond the horizon’s lead smudge, slinking through damp kudzu to rap at my window in the slowly sprawling darkness, in the sodden […]
When she tells me her name I’m thinking of Napoleon’s exile there. Of his hand in paintings, oddly tucked away, and the vague memory that it meant something, once. I’m thinking then of Bugs Bunny aping Bonaparte and how as a child I laughed but did not know the thousands dead in his name. I’m […]
A poem about Led Zeppelin would begin with hair, and sweat, hard light, motion in blur. On the radio the night is all summer, and starry; the light falls perfectly slanted upon the road and nothing rises to check the speeding world. The boys in the car would drop their amplified world to know that […]
Paul Guest, author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues, 2003) and the forthcoming Notes for My Body Double (Black Lawrence Press), talks about a poem he wishes he’d written.
Paul Guest, author of The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues, 2003) and the forthcoming Notes for My Body Double (Black Lawrence Press), talks about his writing rituals.