Landon Godfrey is the recipient of a 2013 Regional Artist Project Grant and a 2011-2012 North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship. Her first book, Second-Skin Rhinestone-Spangled Nude Soufflé Chiffon Gown, was selected by David St. John for the 2009 Cider Press Review Book Award and published in 2011. Printed at Asheville BookWorks, where she is the coordinator and a broadside co-designer for the Vandercooked Poetry Nights reading and broadside event series, a limited-edition letterpress chapbook, In the Stone: Three Prose Poems, was published in Spring 2013. A new letterpress chapbook, Spaceship, is forthcoming from Somnambulist Tango Press in Winter 2013. Her poems have appeared in The Southeast Review, Beloit Poetry Review, POOL, Studium in Polish translation, Best New Poets 2008, and at Verse Daily and Broadsided. Born and raised in Washington, DC, she now lives in Black Mountain, NC, where she works as a writer and artist. Visit her website here.---------
Nocturne
How the jackal eats the elephant anus-first, like entering a castle
through the tool shed.
How more jackals will follow the first inside the elephant.
How the stunned elephant is trying to die but is still alive
each time the video plays.
How someone is watching that video for the second time.
How night fomented infrared technology and this invention:
a small green jackal approaching a large green elephant in a black rectangle.
How the video is playing now, the computer screen
abattoiring a dark room with knives of light.
Nocturne
At dawn, when the sun rides its unicycle
across my eyes, a silent circus movie
has tented and sawdusted the insomniac television.
A ringmaster's perverse jodhpurs
abuse the tutu of a dewy aerialist.
She can't go on. No, no, no,
a title card whimpers, worrying the oblivion
between player piano notes.
But here comes the hero!
An unexpected man in a tight coat balances
verve and bad luck on the high wire,
while three monkeys bite his nose
and pull the man's baggy pants down.
Savior! I sing morning praises
from the little black hymnal of your moustache.
Études
1
The garden ignores the wind’s demands
for Tchaikovsky. Late winter tulips
play Chopin études to studious
snow. Rhododendron bushes adjust
their donkey ears. The thug
wind threatens pine tree
after pine tree. They’re all broke.
Sap costs them everything.
2
What did the lions see
when Daniel entered their lair?
I want the answer to be:
trompe l’œil vey.
3
The river swings soft
through stubborn scoria, all the stones
in their bed like bruised eyes.
Eyes that have struck clouds, bitten
sharp stars. The water says
nothing. Soft it swings. Eyes
that listen to the water’s barbaric
silence. Soft it swings.