Douglas Jones |
Back to Issue 9 |
--after Klavierkunst, Paris 2015
--after Piano-Extremist, Kiev 2014 -- The man with the piano yoked to his bicycle has somewhere to be. He delivers music where there is none: Joplin in the alley. Chopin at the metro's stairwell. Thelonius in the packed gravel below the Eiffel Tower. And there he goes: he's making deliveries in a city on lock-down, offering notes that jump like tongues into the mouths of others. When a city—any city—grows weary of gunfire and raids, of bodies falling to its streets, of falling bombs and what comes next, its people—they must go on. They gather in its arteries. They offer music where once it seemed music could never again be. |
Douglas S. Jones holds an MFA from Arizona State University and is the author of No Turning East (Pudding House Publications). His poems have appeared in The Pinch, Blackbird, Barrow Street, Sentence: A Journal of Literary Poetics, and elsewhere, and have been featured in American Life in Poetry. In 2006 he participated in Poesía del Sol, a program that brought poetry into the rooms of palliative care patients at the Mayo Clinic. That year, the program was awarded the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award. He also served as Poet in Residence at St. Chad’s College at the University of Durham. He is at Western State Colorado University.
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