BOOK REVIEW David Rigsbee reviews Staying Blue by Gibbons Ruark
Martin Jude Farawell is the author of a chapbook, Genesis: A Sequence of Poems, and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies. His plays have been performed off-off-Broadway and by regional, college, community, and international theaters. A graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, he was recently named Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program.
Metamorphoses
How fast must you drive, is it seventy, eighty,
ninety miles an hour, before the soul,
when flesh slams still, can keep on going? My brother,
just nineteen, almost standing on
the accelerator, is desperate to find out.
Escape is sweet
as blood on our teeth
from laughing so hard
our lips split.
Tilted into hysteria, hysterical fear,
a taste as familiar as blood, I try beating him,
try screaming for my life, but he just keeps
looking away and laughing, looking at me
and laughing, the skull already bulging through his face.
I know I will die
from this love,
the dark sweetness
of one blood.
Some knowledge a human body can't contain,
but must weep itself into river, into willow,
howl its spine down onto wolf paws, or rupture
in flowering blood. My brother and I can be angels,
if we will open our ribs into wings.
Our bodies will split
from this love;
they cannot hold
so much blood.
If only when we were children, she'd strapped us both
inside the car, and let us slide into
a lake, my brother never would have learned
it had been left for him to kill us:
We would have stayed her little boys forever.
It is not love
in our blood
that is in love
with our deaths.
Martin Jude Farawell is the author of a chapbook, Genesis: A Sequence of Poems, and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies. His plays have been performed off-off-Broadway and by regional, college, community, and international theaters. A graduate of New York University's Creative Writing Program, he was recently named Director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Program.