The October Editor's Pick Poet is
Scott Urban
Please feel free to email Scott at: surban1874@yahoo.com
CULVERT
driving along, i almost missed my love
for a moment, i mistook her for a plastic trash bag
filled with table scraps, junk mail, and snot-damp tissues
luckily i stopped and slid down the bank to investigate
almost half of her face lay under the scummy sullage
(i remembered the photos they showed us in high school—
environment and ecology—gulls sheathed in a mackintosh of oil)
i lifted her as gently as i could—placed her on a plywood plank—
put her in the back of my truck
rainbow-slicked bubbles in her nostrils
back home, i sponged her clean
(though her knees and neck still have traces of shit-brown loam)
i’d never done it before, but i did my best to splint her broken bones
(one arm veers off at a slight angle, as if she’s throwing her hand away)
even now, each breath is an inward-cough, each step is an igor-lurch,
and the off-focus gaze in her eyes comes from the bottom of a garbage scow
or a treblinka mass grave
she likes to stare at bare lightbulbs, i keep the blinds pulled
we make love the same way that you stack delicate china plates on top of one other
i run my fingers through the brunette scrub growing back on her scalp
she nibbles the dead white flesh beside my fingernails
she sleeps under the bed, won’t let me shut the closet door
there hasn’t been a word with more than one syllable
in maybe a month or two
IACUNA
i think there was something
i was supposed to tell you
something that would change your life
divert you from the slime-track
down which you’ve slid in recent years
or something i was supposed to do
an act outrageous in its bronze definitude
a deed to catch your eye like a fisherman’s gaff
but i’ve been searching all day long—
perhaps all week?—for a word or a reminder
of what i was supposed to say, to do:
the impetus rolled out of my ear canal
and dropped into a crack between the floorboards
like a penny notable only for its insignificance
i’ve walked the garden lanes so long
i’ve let the thorns and winds abrade me
to this wispy negative passing through the gate
i thought there was a word for not being
able to recall the thought you wanted
but i can’t remember it, or your name, either
A MATCH FLARES AT MIDNIGHT
There’s been a disaster: fire, flood, earthquake, oil spill; fill in the catastrophe of your choice. News reporters are airlifted to the area. They stick microphones in the face of a survivor. He’s unshaven and he can’t keep his hands still. “I just hope, after the relief planes land, the rest of the world doesn’t forget about us.” His damp eyes glimmer in the fill-lamp light.
The world will remember him as well as it remembers the helot burned out of his home by Athenian hoplites, the farmer whose crop was devoured by the Rocky Mountain locusts, the Palestianian whose forearm was deliberately broken by the Israeli border guard. The world will remember him as well as it remembers this poem.
Scott H. Urban is a freelance writer and poet living, appropriately enough, in North Carolina's Cape Fear region. His dark verse appeared in the collections Night's Voice andSkull-Job (Horror's Head Press); his most recent chapbook,Alight, from Shakin' Outta My Heart Press, appeared last summer. In collaboration with Bruce Whealton, Scott's vampire poems appear in the e-book Puncture Wounds(Word Salad Productions). His fiction has appeared in print magazines, horror anthologies, and online zines, including, most recently, Lost Worlds of Space and Time Volume 2, and The Witching Hour. With Martin H. Greenberg, he co-edited the DAW anthology The Conspiracy Files. As editor, he recently compiled Jean Jones' poetry collectionThe Complete Angel of Death (Skull Job Productions) and memoirist Ryan Miller's Circle of the Heart, Voices of Comfort Dreams (Elephant Showcase).
