FIVE POEMS

By Corey Mesler

 

Dylan’s All-Night Chicken Shack

 

 

            “I’ve already had two beers

             I’m ready for the broom.”

 

 

You can get a meal, a hat, a

secondary lover.  The

real meat is the waitress with

the zither; she knows how

to gather your wool.

I order a naked dancing girl.

You can get one for a song.

 

Neil Young Poem

 

 

In 1970something

I saw Neil Young live

in Memphis,

scratching away at that

ragged guitar,

filling the air with that

off-key voice.

And it all added up to

something beautiful,

something

unlike anything else.

I still think of it

nights when

the crickets hesitate,

nights when I’m driven

backwards by

some radio crap.

Once there was a garden.

Once there were

players who, if not gods,

were chosen.

And they sang for us,

mortals living on a makeshift

planet, wanting jubilee.

 

Memphis Mojo

 

 

Living in this city

my emotions

are over-ripe, why

 

I spill to you,

why I often

seem like a kettle on

 

the boil.   It’s the way

Memphians

know how to lay that

 

organ ripple underneath

a song

as if it were something

 

in your blood.   It’s

Booker T.

It’s Jim Dickinson.   It’s

 

Reverend Al Green.

Memphis Mojo.

And I am just a pawn

 

living in a city of soul,

with a heart

like a stuck accelerator.

 

 

Listener

 

 

            “Where Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped their bedrolls

             Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole.”

                                    Bob Dylan

 

 

Music dies in me

like the last

plucked harp string.

A coagulant

replaces it, a deceptive

honey.  I strain

to notice the

backbeat; I long for

the plaintive

chorus, but they are

no longer there.

Where can I go now

when the night

becomes too much,

when the light

wavers like a balloon?

I turn as if on

a table.  The maestro

picks up a bazooka.

Remember that I love

you.  Remember

that I used to be called

beautiful.

 

 

On the Road Again

 

 

            “I think I’ll call it America”

                        B.D.

 

 

Bob Dylan stands at the bus

stop, his suitcase full

of half-finished songs.

The road stretches out long

and dry, like a patient

etherized upon a table.  Bob

Dylan looks as far

down that road as he is able.

The bus, he cannot

know, is broken down in

Philly.  But, in another

few minutes, transportation

will arrive in the form

of a coach conducted by angels.

“Let’s go,” the driver will

say with a smile.  “You

wanna work on those songs,

dontcha?”

 

END

 

Corey Mesler, a frequent contributor to Canopic Jar, has published prose and/or poetry in Fiction Warehouse, Rattle, In Posse Review, Canopic Jar, Cranky, Re)verb, StorySouth, Contrary, Pindeldyboz, Mitochondria, Mars Hill Review, 13th Warrior Review, Monkeybicycle, Arkansas Review, Stirring, Red River Review, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review, Green Egg, Poetry Motel, Bullfight, Potomac Review, Poetry Super Highway, Big Muddy, Slant, Texas Poetry Review, Drought, Rockhurst Review, Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Ducts, Lucid Moon, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Mid-American Poetry Review, Midday Moon, Turnrow, Dust, Cherotic Revolutionary, Cotyledon, Buckle &, Iodine, Snakeskin (England), The Melic Review, Freewheelin’ (England), Pitchfork, Poet Lore, Spillway,  Kimera, Thema, Kumquat Meringue, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, Both Sides Now, Electric Acorn (Dublin),   Gin Bender, Blue Unicorn, Black Dirt, The Spirit that Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, BlazeVox, Concrete Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International, others.  He has 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).

 

He won the Moonfire Poetry Chapbook Competition 2003 and his chapbook, Chin-Chin in Eden, has just been published by Still Waters Press. Another chapbook, Dark on Purpose, is just out from Little Poem Press.

 

One of his short stories was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best , edited by Shannon Ravenel.

 

His 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.  His forthcoming novel, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press.

 

He's been a book reviewer (for The Commercial Appeal, BookPage, The Memphis Flyer), fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.

 

 

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