I am proud to post some poems by Stan Galloway, who came to me through my friend Cliff. Stan is a teacher and longtime resident of the south.Connotation Press did an interview I found enlightening. Here is what Stan told me about himself:
"I have lived and taught in Virginia for more than 20 years, even though I grew up in the Pacific Northwest and have lived a number of places in between. My education took place in Idaho and Kansas. Additionally I have taught in Ohio and Missouri. I’ve come to love and respect the culture of the South as I interact with it and as it enters me. My first book of poems (after more than 100 published online) is Just Married, available from unbound CONTENT. I came to write from occupational hazard as well as a method of working through personal difficulties. I find I can create worlds to help me understand myself better in the form of a poem."
Skinny Dipping in the Back Forty
Water sings nine feet
deep where the creek dances
over folds of bedrock
and the push of the sun
brings sweat
and freckles
to the surface
of our skin.
No modesty,
no uncertainty
where we drop everything
to the red Georgia dirt,
hotfoot down the slope,
avoiding frog spawn,
and kiss
the pool
with our thighs
and shoulders,
touch relief and lack
with the same stroke.
The pool laughs back,
delight in troubling,
contentment in naked need.
Mobile in August
I look for libraries
Or other public buildings
Where the air might be cooler
Everyone is insomniac
Their sleep squashed
Breathing always as if one were
ten minutes into a workout
or working up anger at
someone close but wrong
The tunnel under the bay sounds appealing
But not for pedestrians
Shade keeps shimmering
Even under bridges
Air
Hot and long
Blankets even naked skin
Regardless of light
Dreams of rain
Make no difference.
When You Tell Me
After a statement by Frederick Douglass
When you tell me
it is for my own good,
you make your thoughts
more powerful than my own,
as if I were a child
who had not yet learned to reason,
but in failing to explain why,
you do not teach me to think,
merely provide corralling
for your own convenience and profit.
When you tell me
what is right and what is wrong
but teach me not to read
and I find contradiction,
you have taught me rules change
depending on the one in charge
and righteousness is defined
by the one who holds the whip.
When you tell me
I should see as you do
you make your vision
superior to mine
as if I cannot see the world
in the same colorblind manner
that you do,
calling yellow red
or condescension benefit
rape privilege:
two seriously different things.