Mark Neely
"What a remarkable sensibility lives in Mark Neely’s Late Stage, at times cynical and witty, at times filled with awe at an America that is at once beautiful and uncanny and more than a little frightening. Here is ‘the mayor’s blue campaign sign in the gun store window.’ Here is a ‘Tupperware blue sky.’ Here are ‘turkey buzzards hunched like crash victims on the water tower’s whitewashed railing.’ Neely’s is a mind keen in observation, able to construct lines of poetry that slice into each other, that make sparks. More than that, his work has a kind of musical dexterity and intelligence that I rarely encounter, always revealing itself on its own energetic and brilliant terms."
Kevin Prufer
Late Stage
POEM TAKING FLIGHT
I used to see myself as part of the tableau—
walking a furrow, dust reddening my cheeks,
a theme song pumping from the hay bales
on the hill. Overhead, a scatter of cranes
wound their rusted gears. Play the video.
Their black insistent outlines on the winter sky,
legs stiff as oars. Wind rushes through the arms
of a dying elm and then the backwards miracle:
a rust belt town—forge for brick and steel—
rises up around us. Roots buckle sidewalks,
the Baptist church crumbles at the edges,
busted factory windows blink in a chalk-drawn sun.
Did you know a swift can heave itself
from the eaves of a French cathedral and fly
ten months without a stop?
And yet we call them common.
There are three notes in a chord.
Leave one out and it sounds spare.
Not a holy trinity,
but a worldly one: the birds, the fields, the air!
Filed under 2024 publications, Mark Neely, Full-length, Contest Winners
$17 ISBN: 978-0-936481-60-9