An Explanation and Three Poems

Hi all,
I don't know most of you, but I've seen some of your writing (specifically what is on this website) and as someone who until last year thought "blog" was a euphemism for vomit, I am terrifically impressed by what you guys have created here. I'm still a junior at BC, but it's nice to know where English majors go after they graduate.
On the front of interesting news, I've met with ODSD (now called SPO) twice this week in regards to starting a slam poetry team at BC. If anyone is still in the greater Boston area and wants to help/participate in that be sure to let me know! Right, so I promised Katie I would post some writing, sadly the aforementioned slam obsession has taken a horrendous toll on my written work (or at least made me horrendously self-conscious about it). I wrote a few short things while I was driving across country this summer. It's not much, but until I can remember how poems work it's what I've got.


Reading Old Love Letters in Cody, Wyoming

1.
Cody is the unfinished lullaby blowing in the plains.
Drunken sons relive the past with blanks and bullwhips;
they grind their footprints into the orange dust.

2.
The hotel clerk drinks cold coffee from a gallon jug
sun-split lips moving, murmuring endless
incantations.
And they wonder where the legends come from.

3.
Overheard were the French tourists outside the firearms museum
with wide eyes
at the plateaus of this powder keg geography,
at the sacristies of these wind-cut cathedrals.
They will search six languages for the proper words.

4.
Sometime in September you were thanking me
for the best year of your life.
Love is in the bedrock here,
antique love,
bloody love,
the early love
that never leaves.



For Lauren, who was not at the Iowa State Fair

I expected at the Iowa State Fair
something vague and meaningful.

Not, that it would be the grass.
Or the sharp, electric, way
the grass felt
pressed flat or in handfuls

as I sat waiting, hillside.
Near the talent competition, ten and under
with so many decades of flawless pageantry
ushered on stage,

I missed you and your mistakes-
-amongst the other things I missed,
the hollow milk bottles
and most of the red paper star.

I left with nothing oversized or soft
or stuffed with tissue paper that crunched
at the touch.

I left with nothing.

I left for once embracing the sunset
in chain links and Chevrolets,
with light feet on static grass,
humming
in the purple gray dusk.



Babel
Before the tower fell,
every word was perfect
and nobody ever said
I made you breakfast just because