Poetry: Selections from Corey Mesler

At the Door of Morning

Before I go out to get

the morning paper

my dog barks at the

dark, closed door,

alerting the world that her

human is about to emerge.

In this way she thinks

she keeps me safe.

And when I open the door

the sunlit world

is like a bright and parlous

movie. Her eyes

dance with the delight of

a scene she sees every day.

I go out, comforted

and shielded, just a man

with a very small war to win.

Going Home

I own a bookstore.

It’s as old, and as

holy, as a tree.

It exists only two blocks

from my house. When

I am out—

which is rare—I

return to the bookstore,

alive with dreamers,

and I call it going home.

Politics

As I fill the birdfeeder

a bluejay bitches at

me about the proliferation

of starlings, as if I played

favorites. And the cardinal

couple is treated like popes.

I admit this is so. Before I

turn to return to the house he

says, And everyone, just

so you know, hates the squirrels.

In the haunted house

In the haunted house

I spend a lot of

time in the sunnier

rooms. I’m not afraid

to be afraid. In

sleep I am visited by

the hungry dead and

I wake slowly like a

drain opening. In the

kitchen the ghosts are

making breakfast. Their

concentration breaking

eggs is childlike, and deadly.

That There Could be Light

We worked hard throughout

the blind nights, making promises

of love, using the bed to re-

fine our allusions. In the dark,

in the bloody dark, friends, we

worked, we toiled, we gave each

other pleasures soon passing.

We did our best. We woke to

need, you know the restlessness.

I saw Walt Whitman

I saw Walt Whitman in the

supermarket. He was

buying sunflower seeds

 

for the sparrows in his beard.

Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain, is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On, which won The Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis.