Seth Johnson’s Alabama Confessional, 1964
Rich Ives
| My darker wood greens within | a rustling at the ankles |
| but what has fallen from the | leatherette luncheon booths and |
| beefy adolescent postures | one of my father's weddings |
| hitched an average man to | a beatnik cradling |
| starlets' applause as | the slow sprinkle of |
| lawn dreams cooled the neighborhood lust | |
| moused down by | my body's wrack |
| swelling the muscles' | uncertain rafters I teased my |
| fingers over the cool rivets of my | warm jeans |
| one thick remark | enough |
| to stuff my pockets with cocky restraint | |
| an irritating smell of tin | quonset huts |
| no your life is not yet | the back of my hand |
| buttered dry with | ashes smothered |
| bad music and a scar on | my nosey lip |
| a lifetime supply of dribble glasses | |
| they're making love | and blue jeans |
| in the big house | leadeth me |
| because temptation welcomes | I bark at him I dance |
| cement from my fingers | a kind of begetting |
| half of me doesn't know but which half | |
| it only meant | I could forget again |
| I'd like to admit | I don't know |
| what I'm doing | but back then I could close |
| my hands on nothing | find what I needed |
| between them | |
| Here's a reason: | a father's dead weight |
| the frigid boat of a mother | protestant with fear |
| a delinquent game of chance | behind the boathouse |
| how can we know | what we are when needed |
| what we are doesn't know | |
| It takes but a song | to bear another child |
| each creature scurrying | to the temple |
| and then the rain | and its glad tidings |
| rising everywhere | above the houses |
| when will all this happiness stop | |
| there's no hunger left | the truth keeps fidgeting |
| over its own sermon | the way a dog pulls |
| at the dangling end of anything | sometimes the fish come by |
| to see if you're occupied | by the time you collect yourself |
| even the river's been taken away | |
Rich Ives has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artist Trust, Seattle Arts Commission and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines for his work in poetry, fiction, editing, publishing, translation and photography. His writing has appeared in Verse, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction Daily and many more. He is the 2009 winner of the Francis Locke Memorial Poetry Award from Bitter Oleander. His story collection, The Balloon Containing the Water Containing the Narrative Begins Leaking, was one of five finalists for the 2009 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Prize. In 2010 he has been a finalist in fiction at Black Warrior Review and Mississippi Review and in poetry at Cloudbank and Mississippi Review. In 2011 he is again a finalist in poetry at Mississippi Review. The Spring 2011 Bitter Oleander contains a feature including an interview and 18 of his hybrid works.
