Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks

Bob Dylan Sleeping, new poems by Sean Enright

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On Not Dying At 28
      

                       [Or perhaps I will die at thirty?  Ezra Pound]

I’d written nothing. Two days later, I wed.
In eighteen months my own father was dead.

All I thought about back then was writing.
Or having written, I guess. It was exciting

To me, everything I hadn’t done at all.
When would I start?  My future looked full.

Often I sat there, imagining the movie: 
John Cusack would star, or I’d  play myself. Groovy.

We watched the news on honeymoon in Maine:
A man who stopped a tank was never seen again.

In the cabin my naked wife sat on the top bunk-bed.
She spread her legs, and steered my head.

Looking back, it seems only right
To have survived, if just for a night like that.

Now I’ve written some poems, at last.
They’ll exist until I’m dead, at least.

Yawn.  Look at me, tending my legend, 
In flagrante delicto. Elsewhere, headlines happened.

Fosse by Sam Wasson

Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken

A Long Way from Verona by Jane Gardam

Metaphysical Dog, Frank Bidart

Stunning, revelatory poems.  Cannot be read slow enough, or re-read fast enough.

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered by William H. Pritchard

No One Left to Lie To by Christopher Hitchens

 Mesmerizing as is all of Hitchens.  Had to run off to several critical reviews of the book to protect my sacred love for Bill Clinton.  Was challenged.  Now looking in Hannah Arendt on why it's okay to lie in politics.