Gary Charles Wilkens
believes himself the reincarnation of Ezra Pound. Well, not really, but a boy can dream. He teaches for a living and it leaves him as mentally tired as flipping burgers once left him physically tired. But don't try to separate him from it.
His poems have appeared in a bunch of places, including The Texas Review, The Cortland Review, The Adirondack Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and Pemmican. He has a book: The Red Light Was My Mind, forthcoming from the Texas Review Press.
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Michael
Liz Pinch, tight as her name,
lived with my grandmother
on a sandy patch between scrabby trees.
She always called me Mike,
as in "Mike's showin' his ass again!"
when she thought I gave them too little respect.
She owned acres of dead brush
across the road, land she left fallow
season after season, a gray forever
she and I walked in silence.
I'd go to her house after school sometimes
and sit with her in deep leather chairs,
watching other lives bleed on the soaps,
passing companionable time with an aunt
seventy years sour poured over apple skins.
I'd go with her on visits to the baby’s grave.
Liz Pinch, tight as her name,
pinched dry weeds from the baby's grave.
Rainy Work Day
Minutes like rain
drop into
hours like puddles
trickling toward
days like streams
flowing into
months like lakes
that evaporate to float
past as cloudy years.
Jazz at the Political Breakfast
lets the politickers look hip
and pays the wage of long-faced
saxophonists who can fade
into the bass and drums to escape
the hand-pumping and deal-making
and unfold in the corner of the hall
a jazz politics,
where bread is always free
and fluffy like the sax,
love is deep like the bass
and regularity and order reign
like the rhythm of the snare
though happiness shimmers
like a cymbal tap,
until back snaps reality like a broken string
when the brunch is over and the voters
filter out onto the oily streets,
the politician packing the players off stage
with crumpled bills for every man.
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