Progress
So, three years from now,
we’re walking down the street,
my daughter and I,
and she’s sixteen now and has
her license and her
own cell phone.
So, she calls the ambulance that
saves me. That’s three
years from now, he said.
He said, that’s what I call progress.
Bell’s Palsy
Face half dead, a metaphor
I need like a hole in the
ozone. How strange it feels.
How sudden it came.
Like lightning on a clear day:
suddenly I am dribbling
asparagus juice into my beard.
Suddenly I am only
half-blinking. The other eye,
the one that is suddenly
not-me, blurs, stays open
stubbornly, dries and knows
little. It is the eye, though,
that sees where this poem
is going, sad little poem,
unsure how alive even it is.
It’s a poem that wants to grasp
the ineffable. Do you know
such poems? Like speaking
from the side of my mouth,
like writing and only half-meaning
it. Only you will listen to me
now. Only you with your
open heart. Stay beside me so
I can whisper to you the half-truths
I am seeking, here with half
a facade, my love, half-heartedly.
An Email Poem
An email poem
must be short,
the attention span of the
internet fan
like a butterfly.
And like a butterfly
the email poem
has broken its first home
and now unfolds
its multicolored wings
and virtually
disappears behind you,
into the drunkards’
chat room.
About the author:
COREY MESLER has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published two novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006). His first full length poetry collection, Some Identity Problems (2008), is out from Foothills Publishing and his book of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations, appeared in March 2009. He also has two novels set to be published in the next year. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and one of his poems was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. He has two children, Toby, age 20, and Chloe, age 13. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He also claims to have written “In the Year 2525.” He can be found at www.coreymesler.com.
