Evan Wambeke

The Gulf of America
slops out of my mouth
pools on my bed
from my American Dream

where St. Patrick is a Florida Man
who drives the Burmese Python out
of the Everglades & Saint Michael plays bass

for a punk band, writes psalms
about crushing ICE and drinking pain
killers. In this American Dream

Lady Liberty’s crown turns to shards
of sun and when I reach for it my fingers break
off, fall like Icarus, into the logged land

that were once national forests, igniting
on their way down, opening serotinous cones
in the dirt, calling for volunteer saplings.

In this dream, I stand there, watching
these trees grow in a circle
around the den of black-footed ferrets

a family down there
once thought to be extinct
once thought to have drowned

in America’s true gulf
of oil and prairie dog poison.
A Poetry of Violence

After A History of Violence

Where we all pretended to work in diners
or did work in diners, but pretended to be named
short names that fit on signs and clipped
on shirts. The sort that shatter
with the coffee pot, dribble away
in a hickory river between the shards.

A bullet could never hold a poem
or a history, it is the body that holds
both. Punctures and punctuates
this period of ending, this body
of work. I used to stand at one end of a bridge
in Indiana and pretended I couldn’t see

my car on the other shore, pretended
to forget the stones I threw at hackberry trees
that looked like men, each rock ricocheting
on the shore like artillery. There was a time
I was a stone too, in the stomach of myself
and you wore a cheerleader skirt chewed by moths.

You chanted slow, and the words broke
on the bed between us, became a name
that was almost mine,
or was mine, folded into a poem
I wrote on a napkin at the diner
blood stained, and coffee stained,
heavier than any napkin I’d ever held.

Evan Wambeke is a poet from Cody, Wyoming. A graduate of the University of Wyoming, he is now pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Miami. His work has appeared in the South Florida Poetry Journal, The Meadowlark Review, The Twin Bill, and Paranoid Tree Press. He has also done collaborative ekphrastic work with the Lowe Art Museum & Whitney Western Art Museum. He is a fan of football, horror movies, and having a donut with a cup of coffee. More of his poetry can be found at evanwambeke.com.

Banner Art:
Icarus, Marguerite Blasingame, 1935, Wikimedia Commons, PD-US

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