With a Free Hour & Wine
With a free hour and wine glass finally – after weeks of no-time-to-read-anything-but-student-papers, I sat down a little while ago to the new issue of LIT #11 & found a nearly-perfect poem by Anne Boyer called, “Home on the Range.” This is what a poem should be at its best. In fact, I don’t know what I would actually change if I could, except my envy.
Coincidentally, the second best poem in the new issue is also by Boyer, “Grip.” Yes, I’m slightly tipsy & ranking word sculptures. My own poem comes in the middle of the “worthwhile” pile, not the “nearly perfect” pile — anyway, LIT has lots to offer everyone. For starters, here is Boyer’s nearly-perfect feast:
Home on the Range
At the farm, I slept on your heart.
That red organ throbbed.
Then the crop-dusters dropped ticker-tape,
the irrigation pipes waved.
*
Mix a drink of stock-lot,
vermouth and the water table,
The bar will smell like IBP,
And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.
*
Pretend our heartland’s
green repair–
no John Deered plain,
just a pastoral MOO.
Then fourteen feet under
the horny finger
of a bluestem root,
we’ll water witch,
all dazzling
& fortitude.
Anne Boyer
[That last line, “& fortitude”, should be tabbed over two times, but I can’t figure out my html tonight.] p.s. Don’t forget the MiPOesias Reading at Stain Bar on Friday night for more great work — poetry by poets I also dig very much! See post below for easy directions —->
3 Responses to “With a Free Hour & Wine”
AMY KING View All →
Amy King is the recipient of the 2015 Winner of the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) Award. Her latest collection, The Missing Museum, is a winner of the 2015 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. She co-edited with Heidi Lynn Staples the anthology Big Energy Poets of the Anthropocene: When Ecopoets Think Climate Change. She also co-edits the anthology series, Bettering American Poetry, and is a professor of creative writing at SUNY Nassau Community College.
AMY KING 
April 29th, 2006 at 5:54 am erandom note: i’m kind of in love with you.
April 29th, 2006 at 3:22 pm eI like to kind of be loved.
May 5th, 2006 at 1:06 am eI should subscribe to LIT, but don’t (I only have so much $). I’m a New School alum, so it’s really no excuse.Anyway, I fucking love that poem and wouldn’t have seen it if it weren’t for you, so danke.