Tuesday, April 14, 2015

I35 Creativity Corridor: Chad Reynolds, Oklahoma City, OK, April 14


Chad Reynolds is the author of 5 poetry chapbooks, the latest of which are Drummer from Greying Ghost and Eau-de-Vie from Sixth Finch. His poems have recently appeared in minnesota review, Corduroy Mountain, Toad le Journal, Cutbank, So & So Magazine, Sink Review, Spork Press, Art Focus, This Land Press, Ghostwriters of Delphi, and elsewhere. He co-founded Short Order Poems in OKC in 2014.

The Future pic is something I made to combat the banality of the "throw back thursday" meme. I tried to invent a new meme called "Fast Forward Friday." This was my first post under the #FFF hashtag. It never caught on.
The Cerberus pic is of a reading I gave in Brooklyn in 2014. I brought and sold some SOP chapbooks there. A poet in attendance at that Brooklyn reading later mentioned Short Order Poetry in an article about "The Future of Poetry". Kinda nice to think something in OKC might be inspiring poets on the East Coast. Usually it's the other way around.




LOVE POLICY

Who maintains risk of loss
in love and how
do we allocate 
it among ourselves?

A heart policy's deductible—
how many nights of suffering
before further loss transfers to
the underwriter/undertaker?

We warrant we
have not misrepresented
our love history.

It is a condition precedent hereunder
that we hold each other
harmless from consequential
damages.

The definition of bodily
injury has been endorsed
to include
mental anguish.

Our policy covers
everything
not excluded.

Excluded perils include
damage resulting from
defective parts.

A speculative risk has
chance of loss or gain
but pure risk has just
chance of loss.

What is love?

You can’t insure
that from which
you stand to gain.

We can only
be made whole
if first we break.




BLOOD MOON
           
            “Fate up against your will…”
                        —Echo and the Bunnymen

I fell asleep before
the blood moon rose
the night of mid-April snow
and inside the heater
was on and Emily was
naked under her robe
but we hadn’t done it
because the children
went to bed late and
everything was fucked
and I woke up to Gus
screaming about ice cream trucks
because he had had
a nightmare about ice cream trucks
and I remembered that I had intended
to stay up late enough
to see the blood moon
and I drew back the curtain, thinking,
if a moon reflects the light
that shines upon it,
does a blood moon refract
the light that shines upon it?
But I didn’t actually
think that. All I saw was
a darkish salmon-colored haze
basting the cars below,
just a faint glow, like the idea
of the idea of blood.
I slipped back into bed,
put my hand on the bare ass next to me,
pale and cold as a moon,
and fell asleep.




ANCIENT EGYPT

I was the glory
the sun indented

I called upon glyphs
to be the seal
a signet would invent

The noble metals
silver, gold
their powers blood red
Deep cerulean I was

Of prospectors roving,
Of weathering and form,
Of spheroidal granite cavities
where beryl is found
Of faience-making,
Of compacts
I was the substances that fuse

I was base metals
who roved minerals
I was not unprivileged,
I was alloyed with knowledge

What appears to be remains
these beads will hollow

The coffin of an infant
The goldsmith, his brazier

I was Borax in flux
a mixture of salts, oxidization
I was a distinct patina

Is having more or less doubt
the edge that nonetheless strips
an entire surface
of its dummy vessels?

I was entire faces
inlayed with millennia
An age of fuller data
and fewer answers

I was beads on the upper arm
I was a name

I had footnotes
I was endnotes




ANYWHERE, USA

There’s no terroir to
where you are and
your place is no place
special, just another place

Unsettling to learn you could
come from anywhere
and that your features
are indistinguishing

If you emerged from a dirt
you emerged from an unremarkable dirt
an unremarkable weed
in a seam between sidewalks

If you are a citizen of some Polis
it is yours more than you are its

But blandness has
its own authenticities

A weed unpulled will crack
concrete



The building shown in the two photos above was the Biltmore Hotel, which once stood where the Myriad Gardens are now. It was demolished in Oct 1977 and has become the central image in my full-length manuscript, City of Tomorrow. 

The pic above is of my son Emmett and me sitting in a little "parklet" outside of Elemental Coffee where Tim Bradford and I conceived of the idea of Short Order Poems and where we type poems for each SOP event. 



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