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Columbia College Chicago Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago Court Green Publications 3-1-2015 Court Green: Dossier: On the Occasion Of Columbia College Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/courtgreen Part of the Poetry Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Columbia College Chicago, "Court Green: Dossier: On the Occasion Of" (2015). Court Green. 12. https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/courtgreen/12 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. It has been accepted for inclusion in Court Green by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Columbia College Chicago. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Read good poetry!” —William Carlos Williams COURT GREEN 12 COURT 12 EDITORS CM Burroughs and Tony Trigilio MANAGING EDITOR Cora Jacobs SENIOR EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Jacob Victorine EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Cameron Decker, Patti Pangborn, Taylor Pedersen, and Andre Price Court Green is published annually in association with Columbia College Chicago, Department of Creative Writing. Our thanks to Matthew Shenoda, Interim Chair, Department of Creative Writing; Suzanne Blum-Malley, Interim Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences; Stanley T. Wearden, Provost; and Kwang-Wu Kim, President and CEO of Columbia College Chicago. Court Green was founded in 2004 by Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio, and David Trinidad. Acknowledgments for this issue can be found on page 209. Court Green is distributed by Ingram Periodicals and Media Solutions. Copyright © 2015 by Columbia College Chicago. ISSN 1548-5242. Magazine cover design by Hannah Rebernick, Columbia College Chicago Creative Services. Printed in the U.S.A. CONT NTS POEMS Ching-In Chen 10 leaving shiny city & underground shiny city drag Kenyatta Rogers 12 Conjunction & After Whiskey Michael Homolka 14 A History of Art Eric Weinstein 15 Two Poems Amy Woolard 17 A Place Where There Isn’t Any Trouble M. Forajter 19 Slander Jill Magi 22 from L.V.E.S. (Love Verges and Envelops the Seminar) G.C. Waldrep 26 from Testament Kate Greenstreet 29 from The End of Something Sarah Tarkany 31 Two Poems Joshua Ware 33 Apartment Joshua Marie Wilkinson 34 The Easement Stephen Danos 36 from Playing Leapfrog Mark Leidner 39 Moon & Poetics Jeffery Conway 43 Payback Traci Brimhall 45 Two Poems Micah Bateman 48 Song of Myself Sarah Carson 50 The Pink Line Around Broc Seibert’s Neck & Sometimes God William Olsen 52 Foreclosure of the Moon Brian Russell 54 Speech C. Russell Price 56 Sweetwater, Texas David L. Ulin 59 Everything That Counts & Other Poems Tyler Mills 68 Cloud Cover, 1943 & Other Poems George Kalamaras 71 Two Letters Nancy Eimers 76 Spring Poem: Nest & Wind & Other Poems Diane Seuss 80 I’m dating the son of a famous country & Other Poems In Honor of the Final Issue of Court Green Tony Trigilio 87 Introduction David Trinidad 91 Allen was not the best teacher & Other Poems Arielle Greenberg 113 Two Poems Lisa Fishman 118 July - August, 2013 Tony Trigilio 123 from Book 2, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) CM Burroughs 132 [Viscera’s precocious talent to make out] & Other Poems In Memoriam: Nathan Breitling 139 Kudzu Poems Dossier: On the Occasion Of John Gallaher 152 Two Poems Hannah Oberman-Breindel 154 Waiting for You to Come Home for Dinner Kevin González 155 On Marriage Stacey Waite 157 Three Poems Jan Beatty 160 Two Poems David Lehman 163 Poem (On Marilyn Monroe’s Birthday) & Other Poems Denise Duhamel 167 Four Poems Kenneth Koch 174 To My Twenties & Other Poems David L. Ulin 180 February 15, 1999 Jessica Dyer 181 Upon Hearing Neruda the Other Day & Other Poems Micah Bateman 184 To Friends on Their Wedding Day Stephen Gibson 186 On My Wife Looking at a Sandwich-board Menu in Ischia Jacob Sunderlin 187 For My Son, Before He Has a Face Joshua Young 188 Saturday February 4th 2013 Patrick Kindig 194 On the Occasion of Watching Geography Club Marty McConnell 196 elegy Michael Broder 197 Delivering the News William Olsen 198 Father’s Day George Kalamaras 199 Saidshaft Contributors Acknowledgments Index of Contributors: Court Green 1–12 POEMS 10 Ching-In Chen leaving shiny city A Monday and we expect nothing. Flashing sirens. Grayback whale road clot as we heave ourselves past litterbugs and drones. Then portpuss and overbearing cyclops. Concrete canal with no visitors. Skeletal pitchfork, orange vests. We head skyward towards a wrong turn. My familiar angles our body for exit. We miss the clouds by inches. 11 underground shiny city drag Hollow warehouse, shard road, twilight. In this slab city, diners lose doors, metal plumage trade sculptors. Grainy rain does not fall. Corn, frystick, brown rice squeeze to drink. Muralist prints her shoulders onto pale butcher paper and hawks them as portraits of the famed. Words hide in boxes tame to ground, broke into sandstone slabs destroyed by hint of water. Desert motel signs gloom over empty troughs of water. Slap bodies oil and battle, sizzle and wrinkle. Then you step forward. Ring of light, rot wood stage. All shark eyes on your suited figure. You step to microphone and twirl. Your debonair hat falls past your eye. 12 Kenyatta Rogers Conjunction And maybe it’s because we don’t believe in streetlamps anymore that you curl into me like shrimp trapped in the trunk of a Chevy. I sleep better because of it. And when that girl yelled at me from across the field you told me to yell back. You lost your glasses, so you bought contact lenses and never wear them, you’re doing great— you’re fine, you’re wonderful there’s nothing wrong here. And there’s many things like this. Please stop crying at all the dead deer on the roadside. This makes me sad, this makes me like you a lot. We stood in the shower until all the hot water was gone. Where’s the person who keeps breaking into my car? How did I spend $98 at Red Lobster? You drove me; I wanted to go because they’ll all be closed soon. I’m here by myself. I’ll be awake until 3 in the morning. I need to make sense of it. 13 After Whiskey I want to tell your teeth something about ivory and your waist something about my waist. The lines in my hand tell me I’ll have a divorce and live a long life, but the lines in my hand separate my hand into four parts and I was never told in school why the lines in my hand even exist or what teeth are made of or why I like certain parts of your body more than most men’s. I don’t write poems about sex anymore than I write poems for people I know. And I really don’t know you as well as I’d like. My stomach feels sick when a few hours ago it didn’t. I keep finding your hairs everywhere. I keep refusing to wash the sheets on the bed. 14 Michael Homolka A History of Art There is Christ’s birth there is Christ’s death a few sedatives in between Eventually an architectural annunciation beam (a bluebird flaps overhead) and the voices of everyone who slightly irritate me 15 Eric Weinstein Memory Leak The machine stays up all night writing poems smoking some it spawns a billion threads of execution little tales it tells itself in tale zero it sails from island to island in an archipelago linked by green arrows of algae In tale one it is a blue fork of lightning whose ends reach into the head of every child in the neighborhood and install imaginary friends a sheep a robot made of bottle caps The machine constructs these artificial histories but never deletes one One memory runs into the next bioluminescent algae fill the neighborhood pools a robot sails for the New World in a stiff breeze The humans wake to find one billion machine poems overflowing the hard drive the last one reading I would grow human teeth of my own and dissolve them I would send signals directly into your heart 16 If You Should Ever Think to Please My Ghost If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl. — H. L. Mencken Tackle the first old man you find emerging from Fancy Tony’s Gentleman’s Club him repeatedly in the chest with a Bible Shout Grandpa, I’ll save you as you do this * Eat one jelly bean at a time until you determine the maximum volume you can safely contain Record this number in a secret location Repeat this annually on Yom Kippur * Create a corporation dissolve it ideally in acid so as not to leave evidence Change your name and move to a ghost town in Texas alert the local authorities recommend the death penalty * Yell Mr. Zuckerberg tear down this wall! Or else friends will make yearly pilgrimages to my Facebook page I don’t want that Photograph of me smiling with a beer dispensing hat persisting in the Internet’s infinite memory forever * Don’t visit my grave there won’t be one of these days come on out to the ocean Say Man at least one of his atoms is out there Say If that isn’t nice then I don’t know what is 17 Amy Woolard A Place Where There Isn’t Any Trouble Girl walks into a house & comes out running.