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DORIANNE LAUX - SPRING 2009 FEATURE  

The Cortland Review

FEATURE
Dorianne Laux
"Dog Poets" by Dorianne Laux.

Dorianne Laux
Five poems by Dorianne Laux.


POETRY
This marks an author's first online publication Carl Adamshick
This marks an author's first online publication William Archila
Wes Benson
Roy Bentley
Michelle Bitting
Kim Bridgford
Stacey Lynn Brown
Grant Clauser
Michael Dickman
This marks an author's first online publication Matthew Dickman
This marks an author's first online publication Geri Digiorno
Cheryl Dumesnil
Molly Fisk
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Kate Lynn Hibbard
Major Jackson
Greg Kosmicki
Keetje Kuipers
Michael McGriff
This marks an author's first online publication Philip Memmer
This marks an author's first online publication Jude Nutter
John Repp
R. T. Smith
This marks an author's first online publication Brian Turner
 
Book Review
"Sister" by Nickole Brown—Book Review, by John Hoppenthaler.

Book Review
"Superman: The Chapbook" by Dorianne Laux—Book Review, by David Rigsbee.

Brian Turner

This marks an author's first online publication Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, 2007). He has recently completed a second collection Talk the Guns, which will be available from Alice James Books in early 2010. He has received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He currently lives in California and is working on his third collection of poetry.



Home-made Napalm    

—Winter, 1978


We followed a recipe from The Poor Man's
James Bond—my father mixing gasoline
with bone meal and Ivory soap, teaching me
to shave a bar of soap with the flattened edge
of the blade, my hands stung pink
in the morning's damp chill.
                                              He drank coffee
and said nothing of my grandfather,
the Marine, Guadalcanal, the flamethrower
carried on his back. He didn't need to.
There was a thick fog on that morning
he pulled the igniter and the gel
burst into a flame sucking oxygen
from the air, a strange kind of fire
turning inward on itself.

That was thirty years ago.
My grandfather took shots of Kentucky bourbon.
My father downed a twelve-pack each night.
And it was hard to understand why
I'd find him in the living room sometimes,
late, long after I'd gone to bed, waking
to the sound of Josh White singing the blues
in the old-time vinyl, but I began to learn—
to be a man is to carry things inside
no one would ever understand,
things better left unsaid, sung about,
maybe, those rare nights in winter, alone,
the world fuming with alcohol,
spinning in the blue dark.

 

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