April 2016
Joseph Mills
joemills2001@aol.com
When I joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, I was only planning on staying a few years.  That was over fifteen years ago.  In fact, the sentiment “that wasn’t what I expected to happen” is probably at the core of most of my work.  I’ve published six collections of poetry with Press 53, including this April, Exit, pursued by a bear, a collection of poems triggered by stage directions in Shakespeare. Every New Year’s Eve I resolve to improve my guitar playing and learn how to cook more interesting dishes; the fact that each year I genuinely believe this will happen reveals a fundamentally optimistic nature.
My website: www.josephrobertmills.com

Soporific


Don’t worry. 
This poem isn’t difficult. 
There are no hidden meanings
that make you feel stupid
when someone points them out.
It capitalizes the letters you expect,
it doesn’t use punctuation in weird ways,
and it doesn’t jam words together
or scatter them around the page.
The line breaks aren’t significant;
they’re only here to reassure you
this really is a poem
(and not one of those paragraphs
some people insist are poems
but you can’t figure out why).
Most importantly, this poem isn’t long.
It’s not even a page.
It will be over soon.  Like a shot or a pill.
It’s not one of those unbearable poems
that go on and on sometimes
for as many as three or four pages
until you have to scan ahead to see
when it will finally be over. 
No, this one is short. 
In fact, you were done a little bit ago,
and this part here is just hand-holding
to make sure you don’t
suffer from any ill effects.
-from Sending Christmas Cards to Huck and Hamlet
©2016 Joseph Mills