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.
