Issue 16
Winter 2004
Corey Mesler
I have published prose and/or poetry in Canopic Jar, Pindeldyboz, Mars Hill Review, Pikeville Review, Arkansas Review, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review, Rattle, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review, Green Egg, Poetry Motel, Raintown Review, Potomac Review, Poetry Super Highway, Big Muddy, Slant, Wilmington Blues, Drought, Rockhurst Review, Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Aurorean, Lucid Moon, Heeltap, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Mid-American Poetry Review, Independence Boulevard, Midday Moon, Turnrow, Now Here Nowhere, Dust, Cherotic Revolutionary, Cotyledon, Buckle &, Iodine, Snakeskin (England), Flashpoint, Freewheelin' (England), Pitchfork, Anthology, Poet Lore, Spillway, The Pegasus Review, Reverb, Kimera, Thema, Kumquat Meringue, Lonzie's Fried Chicken, Both Sides Now, Electric Acorn (Dublin), Razor Wire, Gin Bender, Blue Unicorn, Black Dirt, The Spirit that Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, Art Times, Concrete Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International, others. I have a chapbook of poems, Piecework, from the Wing and a Wheel Press. I have work in the anthologies Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (Breakaway Books), Pocket Parenting Poetry Guide (Pudding Press), Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Press) and Smashing Icons (Curious Rooms).
I recently won the Moonfire Poetry Chapbook Competition and my chapbook, Chin-Chin in Eden , has just been published by Still Waters Press.
One of my short stories was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year's Best , edited by Shannon Ravenel.
My novel-in-dialogue, Talk , was published by Livingston Press in 2002. Raves from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham.
I've been a book reviewer (for The Commercial Appeal, BookPage, The Memphis Flyer, Brightleaf), fiction editor (for Ion Books/raccoon), university press sales rep, grant committee judge (for The Oregon Arts Council), father and son. With my wife I own Burke's Book Store, one of the country's oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.
She Moves By Me Now
She moves by me now,
it is only remembrance,
a pallor, blank and free
of expression, a ghost.
She moves by me because
I did not hold her or held
her too tightly. And this
ghost is too demanding,
too instructive: I deny its
every articulation. I wake
to plentitude, without her,
these years later, haunted.
My Daughter’s Bedroom
A sharp, salty smell
greets me
in my daughter’s bedroom
where I trundle
in the dark, intent on waking
her. The smell
is presence, a human thing,
so spiky
it almost makes me cry.
I gather her—she is like a bundle
of kindling—and
carry her to her cartoons and
Cocoa Krispies.
A day starts.
When morning light finally
illuminates the room
from which I extricated her
I see a small
diorama: plastic figures from many
movies lined up,
situated, a drama abandoned from
the night before.
The dialog still seems to crackle
in the air just
above the company. A dialog jangle
from some part of her,
some inexplicable part..
I stand there and try to take it
all in but it’s too much.
I wanted to say something about
simple individual animal being—
but the words seem just beyond me
now: how
did that happen?
A Singer Must Die
“And save me a place in the 12 dollar grave.”
Leonard Cohen
Warren Zevon eschewed treatment
so he could finish his final
statement, an album that is both
love letter and memento mori.
Don’t forget me, it says, nakedly,
bravely. What I would, will, say, too.
Beginning
It’s dim when I awaken,
pre-dawn, feeble light
beneath the shade.
Here in my 49th year it
hurts just to stand,
but I do it. And shamble
forward, out of the darkness.