Mudlark No. 49 (2013)

not meant for you   Dear Love
A Serial Poem by Brian Clements

Contents

It’s never summer here   Dear Love
Walter in a linen suit chin held high
There is a Burning Bush in the front yard
Love   When I think about women
I’d have a Guinness if I had a Guinness
If we, as we are   Then we will   Dear Love
Always the idea of the commune in the Ozarks
Dear Love   You climbed the pyramids of Chichen-Itza
A bunch of Americans wishing they were Li Po and Basho
Dear Love   You let the defacer live in your apartment
Saw one in the shower and tried to see another
Into the dark of the show shines a door
It is summer here and flowering
Last night rain all night
I’d like to learn Helter Skelter
The garage apartment with an open door
Where else can you go
Saw him try   Dear Love   in the mosh pit
Count the faces and the ways   Dear Love
You may laugh when you hear the news
This blue and gray day is about to fall asleep
Tell me   Love   again   who you are leaving
How do I look
It’s finally summer and it never will be summer
Those were the best fucking peaches in the universe
I try not to smoke   I’m not in love with smoking
My belly is rounder now than ever before
There is no summer more hysterical
You felt so badly when we made such noise
Now I’m getting a
If guitar playing was so damned easy
What if we were in Austin
I never beat anyone up but some kids
If this is summer then I’m having none of it

Brian Clements is the author of Uses Cases (Mudlark No. 28) and half a dozen other collections, including most recently a chapbook, In Review, from Red Glass Books. He is the founding editor of the small press Firewheel Editions and its Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and he coordinates the MFA in Creative and Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Author’s Note: “Apologies to William Carlos Williams, Ryan Adams, Charles Wright, Paul Celan, and Jim Scrimgeour for my appropriation of their lines or phrases.” BC

Acknowledgments: Several of the poems, collected here for the first time, originally appeared in New American Writing, Otoliths, and Faultline. The cover image of not meant for you   Dear Love is a photo collage made by Brian Clements.

Copyright © Mudlark 2013
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