Back to Issue 4

John Repp

Who, After All, Is Rimsky-Korsakov?

Were the meadow more rich with blooms,
blooms would be too fey a word for the colors
of the Rimsky-Korsakov windblown rumbling thunderhead
we reclined in, sketching. If you wade in a reedy pond,
you worry about things alien to the forty-two steps
between walk-up & Red Apple. Can a bassoon make
a cadenza-choked spiral or is that an oboe? “I’ve already stocked
the pears,” said the new stock boy, so this must be the age

of roller-skates clamped to P.F. Flyers. Then again, L’s thigh
is cold & the nothing she almost wears vaporizes the future.
She’s a comic heroine, what with that silver streak
in her kinky hair, assuming a heroine can lisp & still be so.
The Alexander Technique, camping mishaps & grave doubts
about whiskey made for a gemütlich meal that night.

Sweet

methane bouquet
          my shrieking boy
                   fanned forth at long,

crow-pecked, hyena-chewed,
          plague-ridden, Job-boiled last--
                     3:37 a.m. his second morning home

How Bear Our Child

How bear our child dropping
for the last time the stuffed dog
he toted through griefs & joys so fierce?

We bear so much & so will he
& that weighs far too much.

John Repp's most recent collections are Music Over the Water, a chapbook from Alice Greene & Co., and Fat Jersey Blues, the 2013 winner of the Akron Poetry Prize (University of Akron Press, February, 2014).

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