Fall 2018, Volume 25

Poetry by D. G. Geis

Ex Voto

In the days when a circus elephant
was still a circus elephant
and an ex-wife still a wife,
I dreamed of permanent things.

The things that might survive
the dissolution of a marriage,
or what happens after Assisted Living
or a failed round of chemotherapy.

True enough, life goes on.
“The grass withers, the flowers fade…”
Etcetera, etcetera.
But you do not go on.

And I think of my Father,
cheerful to the end, self-liquidating
with thimblefuls of morphine
and scoops of coffee ice cream;

his optimism embracing even the Evening News
or the delivery of mail order diapers.
“Happy to be here” he announced
at his eighty-sixth birthday party.

A town crier at the end of the world,
reminding us that this “fixer-upper”
will soon enough be an “ender-upper”,
but that there’s always room for more  joy--

that righteous tingle you get
when a televangelist’s
ten million-dollar home
burns to the ground;

or the host on Antiques Roadshow
telling you, breezily,
that grandma’s hope chest
once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

 

 

 

BIO: D.G. Geis is the author of Fire Sale (Tupelo Press/Leapfolio) and Mockumentary (Main Street Rag). Among other places, his poetry has appeared in The Irish Times, Fjords, Skylight 47 (Ireland), A New Ulster Review (N. Ireland), Crannog Magazine (Ireland), The Moth, (Ireland), Into the Void (Ireland), Poetry Scotland (Open Mouse), The Naugatuck River Review, The Tishman Review, Zoomorphic (U.K.), The Kentucky Review, Ink and Letters, The Journal of Creative Geography, Solstice, The Worcester Review, Broad River Review, Press 53, Passager, Cloudbank, Prime Number, Soul-Lit, Crab Creek Review, Masque and Spectacle, Cleaver, and Under the Radar (Nine Arches Press UK). He divides his time (unequally) between Houston, Galveston, Dublin, Ireland, and the Hill Country of Central Texas.