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    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Selected Poems
    Ebook70 pages21 minutes

    Selected Poems

    By Duane Simolke

    ()

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    About this ebook

    This eBook includes the gay love poem "Home," the strange story of "The Gardener," and the comical "Angels and Razors," as well as thirty other poems. These works also appear in Duane Simolke's longer anthology Holding Me Together: Essays and Poems.

     

    Complete list of poems in this collection: Chasing Seagulls, Home, Album, Children in the Streets, The Gardener, Friday Afternoon Spectrum, Reception, second year, Angels and Razors, Separated, Faces, Songs In Sign Language, Forgotten, Higher Education, Family, Ex-Gay? Part I: Cocoon, Ex-Gay? Part II: The Ex-Me Movement, Ex-Gay? Part III: Who Does God Hate?, The Escape Artist, Daughter, The Same Lips, Pharisee, Anne Bradstreet, Bareback, Cycle, Cross, Two Rapes, Rainbow, Elephant on an Opera Stage, Detour, Editing, Process, Haiku.

     

    "An accumulation of thoughtful and moving poetry." –L. L. Lee, author of Taxing Tallula.

     

    "The poems are rich in content and delicate in substance." –Grady Harp, author of Eros & Adonis: The Male Figure in Art History.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDuane Simolke
    Release dateMay 8, 2010
    ISBN9781458062413
    Selected Poems
    Author

    Duane Simolke

    Duane Simolke wrote the books The Acorn Stories, Degranon, Holding Me Together, and New Readings of Winesburg, Ohio. He co-wrote The Return of Innocence and The Acorn Gathering: Writers Uniting Against Cancer. DuaneSimolke.Com includes some of his writing, as well as a variety of links.

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      Book preview

      Selected Poems - Duane Simolke

      Chasing Seagulls

      After a vacation that went too long,

      An excursion for you,

      Me, and your best friend Janice,

      You kept trying to convince me

      To stay with you in New Orleans.

      Always another decoy,

      Or acting like a bird

      With broken wings,

      Supposedly stuck in the French Quarter,

      More by injury

      Than by desire.

      You couldn’t look wounded;

      I couldn’t look away.

      Janice went home first.

      She said Don’t worry,

      To us, to herself.

      She left New Orleans,

      Calling it Jericho,

      Hearing trumpets, avoiding walls.

      Her kitten feet tested the airport escalator.

      Alone, a couple,

      We danced on loading docks,

      Took pictures of seagulls,

      Fell into the water,

      Hoping to float like driftwood.

      I designed your Mardi Gras mask.

      We wore the Mardi Gras beads

      That we swung at each other

      As if scaring away evil spirits.

      Now I leave New Orleans, and you promise

      My mailbox will smell like salt air

      From your letters.

      Home

      When I lie beside him,

      His knee presses

      Against the underside

      Of my knee,

      His hand presses

      Against my chest,

      As if holding me together.

      If I wake,

      And he isn’t beside me,

      I’ll curl up

      Like a frightened child,

      Lost in the dark,

      Afraid to move.

      If I wake,

      And he isn’t beside me,

      The thickest blanket

      Won’t keep me warm

      But I wake,

      And find him

      Beside me.

      He holds me together.

      Album

      I could never mention your lisp

      without revealing mine.

      Still hoping to sound wise,

      I said if you buy an old house,

      inspect it for termites.

      If you buy a new house,

      think of it as a setting

      for 21st-century literature.

      We could never walk through

      the downtown cinema

      without walking out our shoes.

      We joked our way through

      college and

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