Joshua Corey
Compostition Marble

Joshua Corey was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, and has since lived in New Orleans, western Montana, the San Francisco Bay Area, and upstate New York. He is the author of two collections of poetry, both contest winners: Selah was chosen by Robert Pinsky as the winner of the 2002 Barrow Street Press Book Contest; Fourier Series was chosen by Christian Bök as the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award and was published by Spineless Books in 2005. His poems have appeared in LIT, VOLT, Tarpaulin Sky, American Letters & Commentary, Octopus Magazine, Typo, Boston Review, MiPOesias, can we have our ball back?, Conjunctions, and other web and print journals. With his wife Emily and a Boston Terrier named Bogie he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he is currently finishing a dissertation on modernist pastoral.

Be sure to visit Joshua's blog at:
http://joshcorey.blogspot.com

 

from Compostition Marble:

       ragged right the boroughs, the former Idlewild, Hal

       Hartley movies shot in Texas only to be set here,

       the Hamptons hampered, West Egg, Montauk,

       salt water’s long longeurs. Eventually the old world,

       th’unconscious that dreamt self-writing. Ruins of freedom

      ruin mass graves and train stations: the Seine, the Danube,

       the Po, NATO expansion toward Sarajevo: fire flakes

       from burning libraries suspend red stars over Srebenica.

       The end of the West forecast in geography, fanaticism,

       hospitality withdrawn. Stars of suffering and we

       the excluded consolation. Wrapping round about

       over the Caucasus, minefields, oilfields abloom,

       boom: nuclear blackmail, the afterlife in a flash

       of human hair, self-surrounded by the map’s

      biggest blank blue. Hard a port, in fog, San Francisco.

       Peace. Peace and no use in a command center.

       No use in a needle over zero. Peace and no use

       finding ground for the inflammable. Peace

       finds no use never minds never saw a tumbling

                                                                                        body’s fall.