Art: Untitled by Robert Ferrier, @Dante_Dreamer
COUNTRY LIFE
November wind
crazed raging
boattailed railer
bellows through the trails
and then rain –
nearly black
for two days straight
iridescence vanished
branches’ genuflection
gems lost until
the next slothful silent
eruption of thawed earth
At Thompson’s General Store
seedbed of Eagleville
Burnie sorts grain rustling in the wooden warehouse
tosses pallets to the roadside by the tracks
near the burned-out caboose –
its scorched indifference
at the foot of the hills
we arrived from a city
that stopped pulsing on the shore
of the scoured river
many years ago
under the misconception
that the foul wind from the hill
could not reach down into our blood
we discovered we were wrong
a spark of destruction
submerged beneath our faces
we tried to leave before the lights dimmed
cursing the sky fluorescent
divertimenti of zircon weighty and fake in the yard
hangdog blueprints curled on the table
John L. Stanizzi is author of the full-length collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, and Chants. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, Tar River Poetry, Rust & Moth, Connecticut River Review, Hawk & Handsaw, and many others. Stanizzi has been translated into Italian and appeared in El Ghibli, in the Journal of Italian Translations Bonafinni, and Poetarium Silva. His translator is Angela D’Ambra. He has read and venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others. He Stanizzi is the coordinator of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, CT, and a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, named by the New England Association of Teachers of English, Stanizzi teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.