Winterfalling What has to happen to a person to bring him to say love is a fetish of pathology? Here in the Clyde Theater, the old dramas play out-- she loved him and him, got pregnant by him but married him and so now runs into him, which pisses him off-- neighbors in the same row, expert on paint and weather and the season slipping into season with Friday matinees to be suspended until next November, so it’s just us again and streets so quiet you’d think the town was abandoned and these faces in the windows ghosts.
The Doghouse
You’ve got no image, but you’ve got the gray rain against the windows; you’ve got the old crowd with absinthe laughter and good old fashioned whiskey stares, and you’ve got the woman climbing into bed who says, please, no more nightmares.
Eat Stone and Go On
He talks, that old guy in the bar, and says, I’m just trying to tell her, you know, how those words and that tone and that way, how they come in like robbery with clubs and knives and…like a documentary, like how the world has ways to shoot you down, how often we feel the authorities are not arriving to help—it blurs in the explaining-- but how with you I hope for shelter at least and not to be hit by side flak, how a house black from fire collapsing in a deep green field still screams and glows willow-golden, afternoon sunlight passing through, like coming down the stairs of the Doghouse with those spirits vibrating at my back and the shore opening with a heron’s wide blue wings there in the shallow waters rising and falling and heading north to the straight somewhere your voice there, your voice… he reminds me too much of myself and of the sweet dark empty street when we finally push home under the halo glow of moon and streetlight and lie down in the intersection and yell, take me now! Take me now… then chuckle and rise and wander where tide breathes against sandstone cliffs and the hawks grip the tree limbs in sway, sight going out wide, mind going out knowing into the deep dark I ride…I ride… no dock or destination and stars sliding like dragonfish with yellow eyes, and out the way a breath keeps going out and on and moving on endless and ever till I wake there with you there breathing by my side.
Bio: Douglas Cole has published four poetry collections, Interstate (Night Ballet Press); Western Dream (Finishing Line Press), and The Dice Throwers, (Liquid Light Press), Bali Poems (Wordtech Press), as well as a novella, Ghost (Blue Cubicle Press, 2013). His work appears in anthologies such as Best New Writing (Hopewell Publications 2015), Bully Anthology(Kentucky Stories Press, 2015) and Coming Off The Line (Mainstreet Rag Publishing, 2015). My work also appears or is forthcoming in journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Owen Wister Review,Iconoclast, Slipstream, Red Rock Review, Wisconsin Review, Two Thirds North, San Pedro River Review, Badlands, Common Ground Review, The Ocean State Review, and Midwest Quarterly. More is available online in The Adirondack Review, Ithaca Lit, Talking Writing, Salt River Review, and Avatar Review, as well as recorded stories in Bound Off and The Baltimore Review and douglastcole.com.
Douglas has received the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize in Poetry; the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House; and First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway.” I was also recently the featured poet in Poetry Quarterly. I am currently on the faculty at Seattle Central College.