Wake, My Hand
“My hand is dreaming…”
–Charles Simic
Awakened by incubi
of rot
I resurface, strung upon
viscera. I
want my body to want,
but today
I am bone and shudder. I
lift one
finger and point with it
toward
a new way to write, or
waking, a
new way to wake, vigilant.
Steal this Love
O
spunky
little
fast-paced
noir,
with your
com-
forting
women and
your
loose-lipped
gunsels
and your
capers
gone wrong,
gone wrong,
I
love you
with my gray,
way-
laid heart.
I am an Open Brick
The news of my life
has been greatly exaggerated.
The lineup is all
friends of mine from a past
I disown.
The women—and we must
always speak of the
women—are as
beautiful as we let them be.
I was told to wait
here inside the reign of saints.
The news of my life
is about as interesting as the
news of saints.
I wait for you with my electric
pencil. I wait for
you with my blanket of verbs.
I wait for you
because I was told to wait here.
I am an open brick.
— by Corey Mesler
Copyright ©2012, by Corey Mesler. All Rights Reserved.
COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published five novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Mores (2010), Following Richard Brautigan (2010), and Gardner Remembers (2011), 2 full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008) and Before the Great Troubling (2011), and 3 books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.