How Have I Lived …
without part four of Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s poem, “Suite Billy Strayhorn”? I mean, people are on the edge of their seats waiting for Bush’s next lame-o nominee for the Supreme Court, debating Roe vs. Wade and so forth, while I get to sit here and read poems from The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart. God bless America (& thanks for the loan, Lissa). p.s. Please avoid catching a cold as the weather dips and dives around us, people. Enjoy:
IV. Mr. Ellington Denies
And you are such a pretty girl.
You make the boys swoon so badly
they want to beat you to death.
Do you hear them skulking beneath
bass-key? Billy, you’re no more
a girl than Ohio is pastoral.
Keep quiet is a muscle.
Keep quiet is a city
with all the swing gone out of its hips.
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 
Nice, very nice!