RopeWalk Writers Retreat

RopeWalk Press Samples

This page will feature excerpts from RopeWalk Press publications. Here are sample poems from Melanie Jordan's Ghost Season, Jeffrey Thomson's Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, and Matthew Guenette’s A Hush of Something Endless.

Melanie Jordan	Charlie Brown in the Dead of Night This howling makes me shiver, but it ought to be beautiful. I wish he would stop it. And you’re out there, too, little girl, smiling over sticker albums and apple slices. Who is it takes care of us? Who mends trees when their limbs crack, who thinks of a question like that? I know worry is a way of filing, but the folders are too long or too narrow and none of my frets ever fit. The space around my head at night is easier to work with, blankets piled on top of me so I can barely see the rise of my chest. They don’t mend them, that’s who. I don’t know which is worse, the barking or the silence. Tomorrow, maybe, I can win your eye with animal crackers or a pencil with sparkling foil clefs. And what good is that, the blessing eye that might not see me surrounded by autumn’s energy and nearly bursting with rhapsodic blood? It’s a lot to look for. There’s a lot to see in people, the way they hover at the edge of knowing and oblivion, the way they keep on clipping hair and making appointments, clocks with hearts. It’s definitely a tick when I see you, your dress smoothed over invisible knees, tick the way I feel you know me. I’ve danced with girls before, swaying lightly back and forth, just on the edge of what it means to fill my body, of being poured in like wet cement. Then worry filled up my shoes, but it was almost pretty, a haze like sundown or chiffon before I had to sit down. If life is a series of escapes to the punchbowl, I want to ask out loud, is this it? But what kind of question is that? I’ll be fixed tomorrow when the day is mine, opened up like the white cream of a cookie. Keep trading lunches and mittens with me—what is love but one big cloakroom—because mine is the longing of a Hercules let loose, mine is the fear of a burst oil candle, bright with flame and dim with the rupture. He’ll keep it up. Until I’m out there barefoot with flashlight and dogdish, or until sunlight sticks up unruly, ready as a willing head waiting to be combed.

Jeffrey Thomson	fabulous ones This poem is brought to you by the letter C. Cattle egret, Big Bird says, cetacean, the word squeaking like wet whale skin. Big Bird keeps it real—his thug-life strut. Do you like giants? Only the small ones, the boy says. Chinese catfish, cassava, cassowary. He’s an intellectual, spends his days off in coffeehouses, crossing and uncrossing the long orange tubes of his legs, discussing Chomsky, conditional freedom, and Cervantes with anyone who will listen. He marches against the war, a thousand people at his back, chanting Catastrophe, cruise missile, children. Big Bird refuses to fly south for the winter, puts on his scarf and heads out the door. You can’t fool me, the boy says. I know Big Bird’s not real. It’s just a suit with a little bird inside.

Matthew Guenette	A Hush of Something Endless One of those parties where I was the stranger. The sightseers had faces from dreams. Burt Reynolds mixed dirty martinis. Elvis stuck his chubby fingers in the fondue. A barefoot Madonna danced beneath crimson lights, her breasts and hips red shivers with every turn. I watched the city unfold like a palm full of glitter, my thoughts glued in the vagueness of unmaking. But the stoned-rhine Dolly Parton kept bringing more and more bottles of wine. Pretty soon I was terrifically drunk, tripping from room to room like one of Faulkner's minor fools. I told ridiculous lies to anyone who would listen. I'm an ex-con, I said to a lawyer who fanned his starched collars and loosened his tie. I hot-wired cars in the Pittsburgh of my youth. A woman with a bedroom in her voice whispered her demands in my ear. I'm an orphan, I said. I was stolen by gypsies from my native Ukraine. I spoke without regret. I was stuck in the sap of twenty-something and alone. It was my first night in the new city minus friends and a sensible shirt. When the hostess got fed-up with my shit, she showed me the door. Sleep it off on the lawn, she said. It was a good idea, yet as I stretched myself out in the cool, my mind sliding down that blue rail of otherness that makes you a stranger even to yourself, a cigarette flared in the dark. The hush of a woman's voice. Hey, like a bored guest on late-night TV. Tell me all about you. I pressed my hands to the grass. I was trying to keep from spinning away. My name's Vincent, I said, where should I begin?

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RopeWalk Writers Retreat
a program of the University of Southern Indiana