Daniel Bourne
A Letter to Key West
O bearded iguanas beside your blue pools
The bearded poets unable to rise up from their salt
The tourists unable to swivel their hips
Like the hipsters who are hipsters no matter what they do
O name your own price it doesn’t matter you old scoundrel
No I’m serious you can own me till I die
Here accept this little postcard until
I peel out from Ohio in search of even more iguanas
Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods (Cleveland State) Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords). Poems appear in Field, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Rhino, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Many Mountains Moving, and North American Review. The recipient of four Ohio Arts Council poetry fellowships, he teaches at The College of Wooster in NE Ohio, where he edits Artful Dodge, a magazine of American fiction, poetry and essay with a special interest in translation. He is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (85-87) for work on the translation of younger Polish poets, and for seven months in 2013-14 to work on some collaborative projects with Polish poets and visual writers involving a sense of place and the environmental.
Return to July 2016 Edition
O bearded iguanas beside your blue pools
The bearded poets unable to rise up from their salt
The tourists unable to swivel their hips
Like the hipsters who are hipsters no matter what they do
O name your own price it doesn’t matter you old scoundrel
No I’m serious you can own me till I die
Here accept this little postcard until
I peel out from Ohio in search of even more iguanas
Daniel Bourne’s books include The Household Gods (Cleveland State) Where No One Spoke the Language (CustomWords). Poems appear in Field, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Rhino, Boulevard, Guernica, Salmagundi, Pleiades, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Many Mountains Moving, and North American Review. The recipient of four Ohio Arts Council poetry fellowships, he teaches at The College of Wooster in NE Ohio, where he edits Artful Dodge, a magazine of American fiction, poetry and essay with a special interest in translation. He is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship (85-87) for work on the translation of younger Polish poets, and for seven months in 2013-14 to work on some collaborative projects with Polish poets and visual writers involving a sense of place and the environmental.
Return to July 2016 Edition