Earlier today, Gnashing Teeth Publishing informed me that it had nominated my poem "After the Storm" for a Pushcart Prize! In 2018, Panoply, a wonderful online journal, nominated my poem "The Hail" for a Pushcart. That makes it two Pushcart Prize nominations! I include both poems below.
UPDATE: The Hollins Critic has just informed that it had nominated my poem "Posing with a Giraffe" for a Pushcart too! I include this poem below as well. Posing with a Giraffe In the photograph the wind spikes my hair, a nightjar wing in the shade, while my friend’s flappy ears spread like fronds brushed back in the breeze. Giraffes can swing their necks like hairy clubs, bludgeoning other giraffes. But I don’t fear him. Facing his cocked muzzle, I watch his tongue loll and twist in the summer sun, his tongue long enough to wrap around the world like a thick ribbon, like a dark blue ocean. I gaze at his patterned body, the endless geography of his coat: brown islands floating around white rivers of fur, or rivulets of milk streaming down a brown Formica table, large as a cliff with hirsute horns: a double-spired crown, or black stalagmites perched above his eyes, black as a pair of shadowy moons in the blue sky behind us, our own private backdrop. In the photograph I pet my friend while gray wings grow out of the underbrush of my beard, painlessly, as if this is the next stage of evolution. Now, as an oxpecker, I flutter around the bony watchtowers of his legs to his head, where I eat his ticks. Comb his mane with my claws. Ask him in birdsong: “How far can I go if you whip your neck, catapult me into the sky? How far can I soar in the deep blue recesses of our photograph?” *** After the Storm It thunders like mackerel, their scales shattering in my chest like a car crash-- glass smacking asphalt, a spillage of iridescent gasoline gleaming in lost, glossy looks. It thunders like cormorants, whose guttural feathers amble among caverns of stars. It thunders like boars stabbed with bayonets, abandoned in the trenches of nearly forgotten battles. It thunders like the time you left me, the calliope of the carousel we’d used to ride screaming as I stood in circles, lost among a throng of stallions. It thunders like springtime, a ragged patchwork of rainclouds hanging like swords above my head as I try to forget you: your voice like vipers inside my mind, your touch—like your hair, your lips-- like the bones of dead crows collecting at the bottom of the cracked cage of my heart. It thunders for the last time, the sun crawling out of the treetops like a cicada that can still be heard after it dies. *** The Hail (after Zbigniew Herbert) when my only son returned from his final deployment he had across his cheek a scar and above the scar a pair of blank eyes petals of flying glass pricked him in Iraq the day before he turned twenty (a bomb, he said, it was a bomb) he tirelessly shared with me his love for literature but he admired most of all the literature of the fallen catching his breath he asked his fallen brothers to read Woolf Hemingway Plath he screamed that the falling action is near that he has reached the climax and then weeping admitted that Shakespeare did not love him my wife watched him mumble to himself more and more lost at the peak of desire he became an endless chapter into empty blue hives of eyes entered a twin eclipse and his bloody wrists were soon covered with the sticky wet bandages of my wife’s teary hands nothing remained but his tremulous voice what tales he’d crafted with his voice in a deep tone he carried dog tags in a soft tone his brothers’ dénouement white shirts took my boy and drove him out of the city he comes back every winter gaunt and pale he knocks on the door once inside, he stays away from the windows we drink eggnog together and he offers the never-ending literature of his life gripping his chipped glass with shaky hands of hail
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