ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Sean Thomas Dougherty lived in Toledo as a kid in the 70s, and in Cleveland Heights as an adult. He has taught creative writing at Case Western Reserve University and in the graduate program for Cleveland State University. He is the author or editor of 15 books including The Second O of Sorrow (2018 BOA Editions). His awards include a Fulbright Lectureship to the Balkans and an appearance in Best American Poetry. He now works as a Med Tech and state-certified Caregiver for people with traumatic brain injuries. He lives in Erie, PA, with his partner, the poet Lisa Akus, and their two daughters.
Somewhere Far From Any Classroom
far from the talk of writers about writing, far from Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, far from the bar and the backroom at the "writer's conference," far from the book-fair, far from the Carnival, where the barkers are selling our lives for a handout, a grant, a bit of good gossip that ruins a career, far from anything named career, there in the dives and back streets, there by the carapace of the steel mill in Youngstown, the refinery, the closed down paper mill along the lake, by the railroad tracks that run to Buffalo and Cleveland and Mumbai, where two girls are blowing up pop cans with M-80s, there in the dust and smoke and their cut-off shorts and their stolen cigarettes, as they walk down the 12th street tracks towards dusk — there in the sirens and the singed sleeves, there in the basements where someone is putting on a blue dress, unfolding a glow-in-the-dark star chart, where someone can't find their 9 MM, where someone is lacing up their work-boots for the last shift at the Forge before they are laid off, and the long drive back through the dark, the small green numbers of the radio bringing a few notes, a few AM psalms. Is all we need, to keep going. Without sorrow is to become something more than sorrow. Never forget. To shape a breath. The chest must rest. Before it rises.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
