RopeWalk Writers Retreat

RopeWalk Press Samples

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

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