Read More: A brief Q&A with George Looney
Pathos in the Persistence of Hedonism
for SK
Ghosts dance through the dust
drifting like a reminder
of everything that’s been
lost in the redolent air
in the rooms of this house. Music
drones on about a woman
the ghosts want
to run their fingers through
the fragrant hair of and taste the flesh of
as if it were manna
and could make them live again.
The woman is a myth
the ghosts have to believe in
in order not to
dissipate. And the music,
it gets the dust up and dancing
so the house is filled
with the rumor of a woman
only ghosts can risk
believing in. A woman
whose lips are a contradiction
as they entice and deceive. The ghosts
can’t help but want to remember
the scent and the taste of flesh.
Signs of the Times
Disgruntled white men with beards and tattoos
stroll in to a deli, assault weapons
strapped to their graffitied bodies. No one
says a word about the absurdity of this
in the moment. They order Reubens
and Cokes, pay, and stand around whispering
as if no one should think anything
of how they are armed. Maybe they whisper
the stories they’ve made up for what they’ve had
inked in their flesh, stories of goddesses
and relatives missing and missed, absence
its own promise of remedies and love
and every other bit of self-deception
we’re all capable of. Trusting the wrong
assumptions can take us out of ourselves
in ways we never would have suspected
or longed for. Trying to name who we are
in ink burned into flesh isn’t that different
from casting the mute stars as characters
in our stories. Truth is, the stars aren’t mute
at all. They sing compositions we can’t
imagine, even while we like to pretend
they sing our lives as cosmic operas
the goddesses of old share with the dead
we hope haven’t forgotten us any more
than we’ve forgotten them. How far
from that deli and those disgruntled men
is this music of the heavens? Not as
far, it seems, as some might like to think.
It’s always been a matter of denying
who we are so we can say we believe
both in something other than just ourselves
and in the stories of who we say we are.
Tonight, if you’re somewhere you can go out
and see the stars, look for signs of a story
you’d give anything you have to believe.
What Can’t Hold Up
Stone the dead spend time carving’s too brittle
and so much of what the dead try
to get down so it will last erodes
a little more each time there’s a good rain.
It’s the incompleteness that irks us.
Not so much the dead, who know […]
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Looney’s books include a collection of stories, The Worst May Be Over, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Award and was just published, The Itinerate Circus: New and Selected Poems 1995-2020 which was also just published, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award-winning What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations, the novel Report from a Place of Burning which was co-winner of The Leapfrog Press Fiction Award and was published in September 2018, Hermits in Our Own Flesh: The Epistles of an Anonymous Monk (Oloris Publishing, 2016), Meditations Before the Windows Fail (Lost Horse Press, 2015), the book-length poem Structures the Wind Sings Through (Full/Crescent Press, 2014), Monks Beginning to Waltz (Truman State University Press, 2012),A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2011),Open Between Us (Turning Point, 2010), The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (2005 White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State University Press, 2000), Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (1995 Bluestem Award), and the 2008 Hymn of Ash (the 2007 Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). George is the founder of the BFA in Creative Writing Program at Penn State Erie, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
Read More: A brief Q&A with George Looney