Featured Poet: September 2009 Vol. 1 #11

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Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, now living with his wife in Los Angeles. He is the founder and managing editor of www.PoemoftheWeek.org, an online forum of outstanding contemporary poetry, interviews and more. His poems have appeared in Sou’wester and a number of reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Southern Indiana Review and Crab Orchard Review.

Tonight

Tonight, the sun gutters down to its wick as daylight strains

and refracts

in skirls across the lake’s wide water.

Heavy rollers of rain heave in against headland and tree line;

lightning falls in its slow white script to farmland

and watershed.

Still, I know so little of the rain that plays this lake like a snare—

time run thin through the sky’s turnstiles,

and all the grief and shrift I cannot hold but do

moving in from the north.

What else can I say of these ball-peen hammers of distant thunderheads?

What else can I say of this lake most deep

where the mud newt sups and the black leech dreams of swimmers and blood?

If only I could drop into sediment and murk,

so much lost

of the heart’s heave through amnion

and the liquid wake and sleep; so much forgotten of the ocean’s collapse

and the skull cap’s crowning: the boom, the crux,

the good steel bolt slid home in the flame.

Here, in these first few minutes of dusk, I say Sunset,

you take too much;

sunhaving preened its glossy spoke

and last light departed into the west.

Here, tonight, I say Land, you leave us too soon;

sky bottomed out; the lake clicked shut.

~ (originally appeared in Blueline, Spring 2009)

When the Dark Heads of Sleep

When the dark heads of sleep finally open their red mouths.

When the flood waters crest.

When the tails of creatures are lost and regenerated

and no one knows the difference.

When our unborn ball their hands into fists.

When fragile leaves of light break through the clouds—

the connective tissues between land and sky unfolding.

When beds make themselves and hot touches cold

and hands reach out from between the shrubs

and rivers become the tall bodies of women.

When God misinterprets his own messages and we wake again

to our original selves.

When the dust feels encouraged and doorknobs

pop up around us like poppies.

When we discover the latitude and longitude of the crosshairs.

When the walls finally organize

and we look at ourselves and ask what have I become?

When skyscrapers invert themselves and become chasms of lit windows

and the crops deliver themselves: corn

gathering dust in the crib, swiss chard steamed or boiled

and served in all those rose-colored bowls,

forever dropping from their own steam rising

from the dinner table.

When bay windows become something other

than bay windows.

When satellites: sentinels, and the grouse that rises

above its name.

When the bees return and the logic of swine.

When the blood turns. When the blood turns. When the blood turns.

~ (originally appeared in Blueline, Spring 2009)

» Andrew John McFadyen-Ketchum

Featured Poet: September 2009 Vol. 1 #11