Stadler Center Writers Series
Justin Boening & Carolina Ebeid
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Poetry Reading4 p.m. Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building
Justin Boening is the 2012-13 Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing. Boening, an editor for Poetry Northwest and YesYes Books, is the recipient of a 2012 Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America and awards from the Vermont Studio Center, where he was a Henry David Thoreau Fellow, and Summer Literary Seminars, where he won the SLS-St. Petersburg Review Award for Poetry. He was a finalist for the Ruth Lilly Fellowship in 2010, a runner-up for the "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Hotel Amerika, St. Petersburg Review, Vinyl Poetry, and elimae, among others.
Carolina Ebeid is the 2012-13 Stadler Fellow. She holds a degree from the Michener Center for Writers, where she served as poetry editor for the Bat City Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Agni-online, H_NGM_N and other journals. She is currently at work on her first manuscript.
Carolina Ebeid
[In lieu of flowers send a map of your city, send a toy]
In lieu of flowers send a map of your city, send a toy
replica of the authentic thing, in lieu of flowers.
Dispatch the cardboard jet planes & chrysanthemum
shaped fireworks spinning out over Beirut. It is 1976
when I am born & the Hudson River festoons
itself with tall ships named Barba Negra & Amerigo
Vespucci. A boy's choir reaches glad falsetto heights.
Where the angels cloister.
And by angels I mean
satellites, in their seraphic orbits, taking photographs
of us. In lieu of feelings bring your telescopic
cross-hair vision. This is a picture of a cyclone
forming; it looks like your father in his youth.
In lieu of girls named Jennifer born in the Seventies,
burn the skinny cut-out dolls. You don't have to choose
anymore between the two Berlins, as you do between
the two Jerusalems.
(YOU ARE HERE)
standing on a sidewalk under telephone
wires. There are voices within them. Listen,
the hoi polloi chitchat quickened over your head
with grocery lists & grievances & pigeon shit.
If only these were metaphysical, we'd make
a killing. In lieu of money bring
the spirit level
in the syringe. A streak of green bottles refracting
light. Bring a line from a sacred hymn. Like a line
between states, between waking & undulating
sleep, drawn then redrawn as the line between
the shore & the paper boats. In lieu of waves,
bring little rumors, little winds.
Justin Boening
The Moira That Would Not Die Enough
Dearest Daughter of Necessity,
I designed this evil, as always,
to ward off. When, after too many years, your front teeth
released me, you slid my tinny body
into a pocket of silk lint,
kept me like a knife
rarely used and bruised in its rust.
Tonight, the hound of you
is belly crawling through the street
as horns and lights from cars seizure with no one in them
as reckless and unforgivable
as the bald lies I pull like a ribbon
erratically through my lips
about the aboriginal creature
I never wanted to be
just so the endless insanity
of a mistake that once worked goes on.
________
First published in Hotel America 10.2
Stadler Center for Poetry
