Poetry
My published poems and news of upcoming publications. (Astra and Stormborn, left, help inspire me.)
Many thanks to my readers
Latest publication news
Two more poems, falling and Stones, have been published in the Two Thirds North 25, the literary journal of Stockholm University, Sweden. I will post them on this page after a while, since Two Thirds North has the first online rights. The above link will take you to their site. My poems are on Page 54 (falling) and Page 108 (Stones).
I've had two poems recently published: Stillborn 1907 was published by The Ekphrastic Review on Saturday, September 28, 2024. The Actress Polina Strepetova was published on on October 28, 2024, also by The Ekphrastic Review.
The Actress Polina Strepetova
-- Inspired by a portrait of Pelageya Strepetova (dimunitive Polina) by Nikolai Yarshenko that hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow
Twenty-three months ago,
after being buried in black and white
on page 133 of an obscure book
of Russian paintings, you paused,
stage left, and began your wordless soliloquy —
unimpressed with your audience of one,
buried in olive-drab and khaki
in room 205 of a peeling-paint army barracks
amid the live colours of South Korea;
its cerulean and carmine,
golden yellow and chartreuse
unseen in the grey world your artist chose.
When you passed across the pressed-page theater,
your petite drooping shoulders betrayed you:
this portrait was no performance,
and I felt a foreigner.
I didn’t speak the language at the time:
I did not understand
the tragic angle of your chin,
loose lay of your merging fingers,
their rough, labored womb poured
against your peasant dress
like a January night sky in Rybinsk —
Even these were Russian.
When Nikolai Yaroshenko painted you
(with minor conceit a century ago)
did he foresee the glossy pages
that would bring you to my attention.
Could he have known that a war-monger GI,
bred on Budweiser and Playboy,
would spend five hundred American dollars
and two years learning Russian
just to pose these questions
to this shadow of your likeness —
Which is as close as I will ever come
to Moscow.
© Gary P English 2024
Originally published in The Ekphrastic Review, October 28, 2024
Stillborn 1907
-- Inspired by a photograph of a woman jumping from the eighth floor of a hotel in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1942.
https://witwisdom.wordpress.com/2011/01/19/the-1942-genesee-hotel-suicide/
I met you only once:
in September ’42
at Buffalo’s Genesee Hotel,
where rooms were a dollar.
A dime could buy coffee
in the diner downstairs.
Thirty-five summers brought you there,
through Depression, divorce,
nine months of war.
Your bleached rumpled hair rippled
in the 30-mile wind.
Your right arm, flimsy paperweight,
fought to restrain your blue cotton dress
from slapping your face,
your mask of determined
terror. Your legs, unstable enablers,
shuddered outside
the window of your eighth-floor room.
Your left hand fluttered –
a quiver
of your despondent intentions.
No words could
dissuade the step.
That fall, you fell your eighty feet:
No explanation
for the erasure of your existence.
There’s a photographer in Albany
who still can’t believe he shot that frame,
ten feet above your death.
© Gary P English 2024
Originally published in The Ekphrastic Review, September 28, 2024
El Paso Dream
Juarez tethers me like a balero
with a bridge instead of string. I tread
Stanton’s crammed path
over the near-waterless Rio Grande.
I could have walked its dehydrated bed.
Tanned leather’s weathered smell
infuses the mercado’s air. Piñatas,
penuche. Day of the Dead disguises,
candles, coupled like an afterlife
marriage, entice tourists to a tienda.
Street vendors
make mariachi marionetas
dance — ¡baila, baila! —
like I’ll never be able. Still
I hand over my pesos. I possess
a tangle of string, wooden legs, tiny
guitar. I’ll figure it out when I get home
… quizás.
I stop at a corner for Negra Modelo, risky
time for beer: La Linea y Los Aztecas,
Los Mexicles y Artistas Asesinos —
and a hundred more gangs whose names
I can’t remember — own the Juarez nights.
I am gabacho; I must leave. Windless
and weak, I pant on my bicycle up Scenic
past the painted white “A” on the Franklin
Mountains. Gabriel is with me, Sylvia and Arturo,
Melchor y Timo — but we never come here
together.
Images, rapid as a cartel’s AR-15s:
Sun Bowl, Sunland Park, Fort
Bliss, Chamizal, Texas Western wins it all
in ’66. Nunchucks and knives
in the halls of Austin High. San Jacinto Plaza,
alligators in central pond.
(No one knows why gators in a desert town.)
Menudo written on a wall in letters four feet tall.
No need. I can smell it four blocks back.
My garden of prickly pears, yuccas, barrel
cactus and pampa grass.
I know it’s a dream
like I know the El Paso
I knew is lost
in desert dust:
A winding tumbleweed thrown
by West Texas wind. Still
jumbled. Still
gone.
© Gary P English 2022
Originally published in Stonecoast Review, Issue #18, January 2023
Watching Ida Barnstorm the South
Louisiana spins tales: the Gulf storm grows.
I scan my wooden shack,
where light blinks between slats that wobble in wind volleys.
My sons exploring their passions, my wife embedded in earth
pervade the home they once possessed —
Spanish moss memories
hanging from live oaks outside my cabin.
Satellite scenes on my TV depict
Fibonacci spirals
expanding over the sea like a moonflower, unfolding
in a slow spin north toward alligator-green bayous.
Its whale-like blow spews
a cataract of seawater over the Delta.
Signpost, house frame surrender their grips.
Rocks and rebar, studs and shingles
barricade the roads.
Incessant tides transform streets into canals,
houses into islands in my river city.
The onslaught persists until light.
Pirogues emerge to navigate through the litter
as dawn surveys the new topography.
Morning lauds are muted.
Inside, my shelter offers no shelter.
I crouch under uncovered rafters,
amid fractured wallboards, splintered glass;
My waterlogged mattress askew
over a cistern gouged from the floor in the night.
Sons can’t return to the cabin they called home.
The sweat-stenched A-shirt clings heavy.
My coarse-haired, muddy head falls
in surrender.
© Gary P English 2021
Originally published in Grey Sparrow Journal , Winter Issue, January 2022