This week, The Missouri Review is featuring my poem “Day Drinking at the End of Days.” I have an author statement at TMR website, and I have included the text of the poem below:
Day Drinking at the End of Days
after Issa (translated by Robert Hass) and Larkin
Everything is on fire, but I feel about
average thanks to the Larkin plan,
which is to work all day and get half drunk
at night this is how I wrote my books and raised
my kids and rebuilt after Katrina, the first hurricane
to leave a permanent mark–a part of me
will always be exiled in a hotel room
wanting to stab in the eye anyone who says
I wonder if they should rebuild, but there is a case
to be made–why rinse cans for recycling
that winds up at the dump, not to mention
the kids I birthed into this hot mess
of a red state no amount of green
or bayou fog can ever make up for it–
there are literal pilots dive bombing pesticides,
not to mention the open secret militia stonemason
who made a house call to say he has our back—
this was pre-insurrection so I thought he was
being friendly, despite the moat of mean dogs
patrolling his compound, but now I wonder
if it was a sign as when a cardinal
slammed into my car, his soul released
in an upward blast, a feather bomb–
is the crimson bird prophetic, a heart
beating outside of my body, is it time
to tie off loose ends, to enter deeper into
or to wake from my rotgut buzz
so that I might sing as I walk into the fire
I am definitely the sort who tends to get half drunk at night–this blurs the worries from my mind and helps me to get some sleep, something that eludes me at times, and then leaves a nasty footprint on the following day. This poem begins with some references to poems that I love, and then veers into a sort of poetic hopelessness, which, if you think about it, may not be that hopeless after all.
Saturday and Sunday I will be enjoying the New Orleans Poetry Festival. They have a great line up, including Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio, which is one of my favorite books of poems EVER. Here’s a video of him reading and discussing his ‘syncopated sonnets.’
I am looking forward to a poem-filled weekend, and hope to meet all sorts of poetry friends, including the editors of Fine Print (“a fuck above the fold”) and Belle Point Press.
Alison Pelegrin 