New Poetry by Gary Hawkins

Four new poems by alumnus Gary Hawkins (poetry, ’95) appear online in Waxwing:

Vanishing Point

Asphalt, bitumen, tarmac —

all too poetic for you.

For you, the road glows

 

vaselined

like the sequence

of a television dream

…

Continue reading online.

 

Front of the House

 

In the years of their courtship he was a front waiter at the best restaurant in town. Though she could hardly afford to dine there, some nights he’d come to her window late, after he’d closed down the dining room and recite long, fluent descriptions of the evening’s courses, whispered to her so as not to wake up the man from whom she rented her room. She liked most how he spoke of the cheeses and all the ways he sought not to say “stinky” — though they both loved the stinkiest bleus, which some nights he would palm from the kitchen, along with an unfinished bottle of Dom left by one of his regulars, and he would pull taut the linen of her sheets and carefully lay out a cheese course, which their lovemaking would inevitably dismantle. She knew that she should not fall for this…

Continue reading online.

 

Parenthetical for Our Tenth Year

Leaving the whole sky overhead,

a guywire of ridgeline holds

to this low grove where our cabin sits

within white pines, yearly shedding

 

their parentheses to the forest floor.

Inside, we whisper and cough,

hum the slow curve of bodies.

Our asides become our plot.

…

Continue reading online.

 

The Late Radical Reckons Mr. Baldwin

This isn’t going to work out,

America.