1 poem
by Gregory Loselle
After-Dinner Sestina
Across the table, scattered grains of corn
Pick out the evening shadows, stretched from
The bowl I’ve tilted, spilled. Outspread, forlorn—
More distant than connected, like the orbs
in maps of galaxies—each solitary traveler, one
To an orbit, scattered like grains of corn
I’ll sweep up with the flat reach of my arm.
This universe is addled, idle, dumb:
The bowl I’ve tilted, spilled, spread out, forlorn
As empty spaces silent, meaning-shorn:
Mechanical, as all things are in sum
By depth and measure. Scattered grains of corn
Are planets, asteroids, a heap of forms
Blown outward from the center, from the drum
Creation sounded in the primal storm
Of being being modeled, being born.
The universe is always, all ways thumbs:
Across the table, scattered grains of corn
I’ve constellated, spilled, spread out, forlorn.
Gregory Loselle
Gregory Loselle has won four Hopwood Awards at The University of Michigan, where he earned an MFA. He has won The Academy of American Poets Prize, the William van Wert Fiction Award from Hidden River Arts, and The Ruby Lloyd Apsey Award for Playwriting. He was the winner of the 2009 Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, The Robert Frost Award of The Robert Frost Foundation, and the Rita Dove Prize for poetry (where he won both First Prize and an Honorable Mention) at Salem College. He has won multiple awards in the Poetry Society of Michigan’s Annual Awards Competition. His first chapbook, Phantom Limb, was published in 2008, and another, Our Parents Dancing, in 2010, both from Pudding House Press. Two more, The Whole of Him Collected, and About the House, were published by Finishing Line Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively. His short fiction has been featured in the Wordstock and Robert Olen Butler Competition anthologies, as well as in The Saturday Evening Post, and The Metro Times of Detroit, and his poetry has appeared in The Ledge, Oberon, The Comstock Review, Rattle, The Georgetown Review, River Styx, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, Alehouse, Poetry Nook, Sow’s Ear, and online in The Ambassador Poetry Project, among others. He teaches secondary English at Gabriel Richard Catholic High School in Riverview, MI, just south of Detroit.