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Corey Mesler |
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It’s Roget’s Birthday
It’s Roget’s birthday and I am feeling plenipotent. If I can just nail the right word to the right tree it may be the map out of the forest. It may be the ultimate key to the ultimate lock. The lock that guards the fortress of language, the one you and I never tumble to, stuck as we are, wordless here, even today, even on Roget’s birthday.
Getting There
I once wrote a poem so long the end was never in sight. Brave readers who ventured into it were dismayed to discover that as they read the poem it kept expanding. This was not the primary goal of the poem, of course, to exasperate. No, its primary goal was to wrap things up neatly, to round off the end like a knot in line, & to explain things inexplicable. Such is the lack of success common to poets. The dreams we live in vs. the concrete kitchen of our restless peregrinations. Reader, this is not that poem. Friend, this poem will end too soon.
See Me
On the page blank as a stare I make a mark. It is a birthmark. I am born again here, in your cold country, in your deadly, blank eye. Take me in like a vista. Take me in like a traveler. I am not a traveler. I am mote, only large enough to make you look.
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© Corey Mesler January 2007
COREY MESLER is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, American Poetry Journal, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Adirondack Review, Poet Lore and others. He has also been a book reviewer for The Memphis Commercial Appeal and Memphis Flyer. A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, published by Algonquin Books. Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002. Nice blurbs from Lee Smith, John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Frederick Barthelme, and others. His new novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, came out in January 2006. It garnered praise from George Singleton, Marshall Chapman, Steve Stern and others. His latest poetry chapbooks are Short Story and Other Short Stories (2006), The Hole in Sleep (2006), The Lita Conversation (2006) and The Agoraphobe’s Pandiculations (2006). His poem, “Sweet Annie Divine,” was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He also claims to have written “Gitarzan.” Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com
To contact the author, email here