April 2015
My latest poetry collection, Put This On, Please: New and Selected Poems, came out in 2014 from Red Hen Press. My other collections are Ship of Fool, The Complete Book of Kong, Flickers, O Paradise, and Enter Dark Stranger. My poems have appeared in more than 35 anthologies and textbooks, as well as on The Writer's Almanac and in such periodicals as Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Boulevard, The Southern Review, Plume, Columbia, Rattle, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Epoch, and New Letters. I live in the Kansas City area and teach in the University of Nebraska Low-residency MFA in Writing Program. I am currently Poet Laureate of Missouri.
Stark Weather
. . . and it seem as though i could
see ny heart before ny eyes, turning
dark black with Hate of Rages, or
harhequinade, stripped from that munner
life leaving only naked being-Hate.
- Charles Starkweather
On the Great Plains in March,
the wind blows for days.
Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap;
things begin to come loose.
Once they found old Miss Purdy
wandering at midnight on U.S. 40,
her dainty-laced nightgown billowing
over her spindly, blue-gray thighs.
It took three deputies to hold her down
till the doctor arrived.
On the Great Plains in March,
the dry elm scrapes
at an upstairs window,
dust devils swirl and disperse
across the wide, empty fields,
and a pistol shot sounds
no louder than a screen door
slapping on a porch.
-from Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 1989)
. . . and it seem as though i could
see ny heart before ny eyes, turning
dark black with Hate of Rages, or
harhequinade, stripped from that munner
life leaving only naked being-Hate.
- Charles Starkweather
On the Great Plains in March,
the wind blows for days.
Gutter pipes vibrate, shingles flap;
things begin to come loose.
Once they found old Miss Purdy
wandering at midnight on U.S. 40,
her dainty-laced nightgown billowing
over her spindly, blue-gray thighs.
It took three deputies to hold her down
till the doctor arrived.
On the Great Plains in March,
the dry elm scrapes
at an upstairs window,
dust devils swirl and disperse
across the wide, empty fields,
and a pistol shot sounds
no louder than a screen door
slapping on a porch.
-from Enter Dark Stranger (University of Arkansas Press, 1989)
©2015 William Trowbridge