Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Adirondack Review, American Poetry Journal, Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, H_NGM_N, Center, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Jabberwock Review, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Smartish Pace, others. He has two novels from Livingston Press: Talk: a Novel in Dialogue (2002) and We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2007). His novels received nice blurbs from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Miles Gibson, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme, Marshall Chapman, George Singleton and John Grisham, among others. He has also published 5 chapbooks in 2006, with 4 more due in 2007. His first full-length collection of poems, Some Identity Problems, is due out from Foothills Publishing, in 2007. His poem, “Sweet Annie Divine,” was chosen for Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. He has been nominated for the Pushcart numerous times. He's been a book reviewer, fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.

Winter 2007

Table of Contents - Vol. III, No. 4

In Basketball as in Life it is Important to Keep the Birds from Waking

for Toby

In the backyard, when you were a boy, we
threw the ball continually toward the sky,
a basket hovering nearby.
Now, it has been a while since either of us
felt the spin of that small planet
on its significant flight.
My body doesn’t quite unfold the way it used
to, and you are beyond fatherly
attentions, fatherly credence. I have seen what
you can do with pencil, with
paintbrush, with words. And, when I witness you
tread the earth so lightly, blithe
and smart and alert, I can only hope to hang
around, watch the game unfold,
like a just court, like a sky written over with flight.

Eggleston in Scotland

for Doug Hoekstra

It’s always true. You travel
halfway around the world
and find home.
William Eggleston, the
master of the particular, hangs
in a gallery
in Edinburgh. The pictures
depict life in Memphis. That’s what
the promotional information
says. It says, he is asking us to readdress
the everyday. It’s always true.
We must readdress the everyday. A
photo can tell us this,
when we’re wandering,
when we’re unmoored, when
we have traveled far and found that the
familiar is always with us.
The familiar is always with us.
The familiar, the everyday, is invisible.
But, the photograph says, look, here.

Surprise Lily

My daughter brings me a surprise lily
in a small jelly jar glass
for my workspace.
It sits there now, glowing like a small
sun. Its magic is the magic
that came from her delicate hand. And the
surprise is the elegance of
its spidery arms, reaching out across the
desk as if to hold me up. It holds me up.

Poetry Essays Fiction Book Reviews