ISSUE 45
November 2009

Joanne Dominique Dwyer

 

This marks an author's first online publication Joanne Dominique Dwyer holds an M.F.A. with the Warren Wilson's Program for Writers. She has poems published or forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Conduit, FIELD, The Massachusettes Review, The New England Review, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Bernalillo, New Mexico, and is a 2008 Rona Jaffe Award recipient.

Love Poem: Flat Out    

                                         If to love is to fall
                                          then I'm flat out.
                       Knee-down on the cement handicap ramp.
                               Slammed fetal near the dog bowl
                                    on the poppy-red linoleum.
                            In the moonlit field of alfalfa and iris
                        I am wedded to dirt, to the imprint of body.
                          See me fainting in St. Augustine's arms.
                        Grass-green spittle at the corner my mouth.
                         Lying low in a canoe on the river of Lethe.
                                       A water leak in the bark.
                                            If to love is to fall
                             find me bandaged in the root cellar
                     drinking Milk of Magnesia with Billie Holiday.
                              She's in a half-slip and a pointed bra
                       swaying on tiptoes standing on a crate of beets
                                         beneath the window
                                     trying to catch a little light
                                 from the constellation of Venus.
                                    I'm damp from night sweats
                                   lying under old newspapers—
                           not wanting to tell her there's a ladder.
                                 
                                                                   
                               
                     

 
                     

                                                           

 

 

Joanne Dominique Dwyer: Poetry
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