November 15-21, 2004: Ryan James Wilson and Cathleen Daly

Ryan James Wilson and Cathleen Daly

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Bio (auto)

I am a recent graduate of the University of Georgia Currently, I reside in Albany, Georgia, where I am the English department head at a private school I have previously been published in Skein and The MidSouth Review.

The following work is Copyright © 2004, and owned by Ryan James Wilson and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.

Closure Most contemporaries discuss closure as if it were a sad girl everyone knows has V.D who sits in the darkest corner of some dive frequented by poets Seated at the stained bar in the dim light, clichés and platitudes drink Jack-and-Cokes with their elbows familiarly on the counter, each offering unwanted advice to the others Meanwhile, at the most visible tables up front, a group of grizzled old metaphors, among them Rain and Road and Mirror, drink whiskey sours and offer gravelly salutations to everyone coming in before resuming their stories of lost grandeur But when I enter the bar, I move decidedly toward the girl in the corner and begin a conversation, ignoring the snickering and whispering behind me And at the end of the night, I dance her around the bar, her white dress whirling through smoky haze and blue neon, her voluptuous body tantalizing some, boring the tired eyes of others Then I lead her out hand in hand into the moonlight, letting people imagine they already know what ending awaits deep in the darkness Of course, it is all to create that momentary effect: smiling, we both know I could never take her home. Diet Life Joanne could not make it to the party this evening Last week, at the café, between enumerating calories and measuring spoonfuls of Sweet-n-Low, she said she was going on a diet the way someone might say he was going to the hospital I imagined her outside the double doors, starting at a Richard Simmons bust, Jane Fonda stature, with hungry eyes Of course, as she explained, this was done in the interest of her health and so she would look better in the nude Tonight she called to inform me that her diet life was such a success she could not possibly risk coming out to eat the fatty foods present at my parties At once, I pictured her as Circe Myself and my guests transformed into pigs, snuffling through the table of cold meats and snorting past the finger sandwiches So I hung up the phone And, gathering attention, I offered a toast: “Eat until logy, drink until drunk, love until broken, and live until death ” Then the party went on without her

The Main Meat your lips advertise the abundance of plums coyly sitting in repose on your rubber-young face I am a lush rainforest say your dark lashes grazing your cheeks and when you floated toward me like perfect church so willing to house my lost and feral leanings I thought Iíd swoon like condiments ready to garnish the Big Roast ready to adorn the Main Slab but plum lips blew sand-dead stories into my heart so softly you suckled your plums gentle leeches you placed them all over my body leaving the bleeding time those familiar holes and trust trickling in tired rust-red rivulets away America the Bent banding together in grief we fell for a chieftain and feathers atop he strode harder than the callused finger pads squeezing stone rubble sifted for signs of life this heart tired of the pageantry, of the body-count, drifted, strayed from a multiple choice nation pointed pencils pushing a, b, c, or d down hard here was a test the answers, clean little islands all those gray ovals had to be signposts pebbles at least river-stones eyes of the water, leading us home papa woodcutter betrayed us for his new one legs of timber he stalked duty ax-cutting his children loose for the mouth of the night to swallow only the moon-lit stones blink in regret