Outdoor Typewriter
A thin green vine
snakes its way
up through the keys
of the black and
brown typewriter
in our meditation garden.
Nature will always
win over mechanics.
What beautiful poems
that vine is writing.
Rewriting Shakespeare
In high school I rewrote
Macbeth, setting it
on the streets of Philadelphia.
It was an assignment.
Also, I felt like a god.
Gayla Naked
Just one more poem about
Gayla naked
and how I cried when she
could not love me
and how I slept on the floor
every midnight
till my heart grew calloused
and my third eye
stopped seeing Gayla naked.
The day after
The day after
the injection
is always a
good day.
God, who is
usually bored,
leans forward
a bit. In his
teeth he holds
the black reins.
The Hours
I don’t know what to do with these
late-life hours. They seem
so buoyant, so full of air,
so perfect and endless and terrible.
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Lunch Ticket, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 50 books of fiction and poetry. His newest book, A Troubling of Goldfish, is from Big Table Books. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.