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About Neil Astley

Poets love a revolution. Many poets I met, in the years I spent running the Poetry Society in London, seemed to foster secret fantasies of living in a time when samizdat pamphlets, typed on hidden typewriters and smuggled to readers who treated them as if they were stone tablets, could change the world. Most poetry,…

Summer Poem #3

In the middle of my life I had the most marvelous piece of luck I entered a hotel and among golfers pregnant with beautiful minor worries watched the cheerleaders gallop as James Wright said terribly against each other’s bodies but really it was not except for their cries of happiness bouncing off the mountains surrounding…

Of Ownership

after Joy Harjo   The verb has a long history of violence: to take is to grab, seize or capture, esp. by force; note its hard k set against the long vowel, a sign of intent, this cave of sound. He took her by the throat and shook her is one in a proliferation of…

Etching, Drypoint

it starts in rage not anger or rancor or a bitch cornered whose fear-fuelled snarl turns fit nor the politesse of some pale Ramon screaming         no         more of a jonesing more veins stretched as pig gut over sphincter mince more a thumbnail that breaks the skin to pull a strip or length of rind to…

The Deer

The deer has the eyes of a deer in headlights. I must have them too, sitting in the car, driving. The deer came out of nowhere. It is magic. It’s the kind of magic you wish wouldn’t happen. The deer must be thinking the same about me. The road came out of nowhere, this man…