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Claudia Grinnell
Claudia Grinnell was born and raised in Germany. She now
lives in Louisiana, where she teaches at the University of Louisiana, at Monroe. Her
poems have appeared in reviews and magazines such as The Kenyon Review, Exquisite Corpse, Hayden's Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, Mudlark, Logos,
Minnesota Review, Diner, Urban Spaghetti, Greensboro Review and others.
Her first full-length book of poetry,
Conditions Horizontal, was published by Missing Consonant Press in the fall of 2001.
She was the recipient of the 2000 Southern Women Writers Emerging Poets Award. In 2003, she was a
finalist in the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize Competition. In 2005, she received the Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in poetry.
Elements of Production
Shaped with an eye toward
Translation into a moving medium
The details are interchangeable
Cogs marching uninformed
Long and gray
If there had been a day like that
Determined, distinguished
In its consumption of the last bit
Almost Too Good To Be True
I appreciate it, I really do. Several consonants
later, I still don't have
a clue. I take a stab at pillow, anything
nothing - just a handful
of down. Beloved, let us once more praise
this game: quick
Wrist action, wheels spin, heels
click. What would you like
to do. You can set your compass by this, get
wracked good. We eat
to fill ourselves up. Our enemy's drive thru
gets firebombed,
we do a drive by at the funeral. I should tell you
about this drive.
Watch this drive. I have banked
the edges of this yard
with rocks. Red rocks. Or blue. I can never make up
my mind. What we want, they wonder:
perhaps to maintain
the illusion, perhaps for every conceivable chick not to come
home to roost. Assuming, perhaps
laughingly naïve, never far
from tears: small girl rescued
from well,
abusive evil doer,
or appetite for pork. Alone,
except for the cat, no, make that
the dog. She's bent, and not
from supplication. And the hero,
the hero had his identity stolen: my turf,
staked out/upon, cocked
to kill, white feathers everywhere.
Call It What You Want
It could be worse, of course, it always could be
one step from the greased slide into a mix of booze
and boredom - this is how Dick Noire would read
this, played out in two black and white
hours. There'd be dames, shimmering from
car to bar, wearing a procession of furs (so freshly dead
they still purr) even in a New York heat wave
when fire hydrants arc water over half-naked street kids.
We (you and I) look at it with much more pedestrian eyes
(if eyes could walk!) and find much to repair: a touch
of white paint here, a coat of wax on hard wood
floors (I see my echo), a gray hair in a thinning multitude?
a list of small sadnesses. Cutting open a bag
of dried tomatoes becomes a heroic act, selfless
abandon in the face of an angel crashing
into your balcony and staying dead: first you think
at least he didn't hit me and then what.
copyright © Claudia Grinnell
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