ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies, selected by D.A. Powell for the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Doppelgangbanger (Haymarket Books, 2021). He was awarded a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and he has also received fellowships from Cave Canem, The Conversation Literary Festival and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Granta, The Nation and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus and on the editorial board at Alice James Books.
Also by Cortney Lamar Charleston:
Doppelgangbanger
Telepathologies
… Everyday Something Has Tried to Kill Me and Has Failed
It’s Important I Remember That a Tank Has Never Stopped the Lyric—
as the same book they slammed shut on Lorca
I spread open like anatomies of ascension,
and from those pages the fascists' bullets fly
into my marveled mouth like zealous insects.
I gag. I cough not unlike an exhausted trigger. I spit
into my hand then glance down to find the barren shells
of sunflower seeds, and then I laugh. I laugh
like a dangerous man who knows that he's dangerous
to somebody who's dangerous to everybody.
With this, I am changed inside as other things are changed—
as blood is to vapor; as a full magazine is to an empty one.
But in leaving the bones of letters behind, I become idea:
something that no soldier or assassin can assign death.
A body is a body; a body of work is so much more.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
