Chad Prevost is Editorial Director of C&R Press (www.crpress.org). He is the author of Snapshots of the Perishing World
(WordTech/Cherry Grove), A Walking Cliché Coins a Phrase: Prose Poems, Letters and Microfictions (Plain View), and three chapbooks, Chasing the Gods and Chad Prevost's Greatest Hits (Pudding House), and White-Feathered Bodies (Q Avenue Press). Two poems and an interview with Prevost on the "state of poetry in America" have recently been posted on The Huffington Post. His work has recently appeared in the anthologies Bear Flag Republic: California Prose Poems and Poetics (Alcatraz Editions), Come Together: Poems of Peace and Protest (Bottom Dog), and City of the Big Shoulders (Iowa UP), as well as in the magazines American Poetry Journal, Hunger Mountain, The Seattle Review, Sentence, and The Southern Review.
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Unreaptable Lost Story
For example, Glen stares at the novel he’s been reading by Trundite
but nothing comes. He looks around and remembers
he’s in Costa Rica, which is why he was napping. He’s a professor now,
and hadn’t wanted to go to Costa Rica and miss
the semester’s first day, but his brother is getting married
and all the arrangements have been made on Glen’s behalf,
and now that he’s here he admits
he has been feeling better, especially with the surfing, until now
forgetting where the story goes!
Jim stops by.
Jim from Richmond and he remembers high school.
Something about high school! It’s the 20th reunion this year,
and he’s actually considered going back for the first time ever.
Then Randy swings by. He and Miranda will be at the pool.
Shelley says she’ll be reading by the beach until dinner.
Shelley has a good novel going that she started at the airport,
a real page turner. Something like: lawyer, secret past, love, redemption.
That is not the story. Where the hell could it have gone?
That evening Glen simply cannot revel with the revelers.
For instance, he’s depressed. Sarcastic remarks tip the point
of his tongue, blunting his sense of humor. Besides,
he’s on board now with the sinking, crushing down
several lugubrious cervezas and staring out at the Pacific, equatorial sun
setting early, and (wait!) he begins to feel in resonance
with the story weighing until now like a millstone from his neck,
and the story feels more Lorca than Rilke, erupting volcanic
and red-tinged from the earth’s center,
and as he watches the surfer’s silhouettes, he thinks, dark sword.
Why? Who knows, but the story is closing in now
from the mystery where it lurked,
and the man sweeping the resort pool steps has something to do with it,
a man who looks in-between
middle and old age, and so does the old Italian woman
he remembers from last year and how she rolled the soap
over the soiled clothes day in and day out.
All this time
the story has wanted to embody the story’s own story, to disappear
with a little distance like everything below on take-off!
The story left off at the part when Glen bargains
to be known only better to himself, and maybe a little more, too,
about the vast world and how, like a riptide,
it stirs up from below and swallows you, swallows you whole.