thomas david lisk

The Borders of Gaza

The Borders of Gaza

In breakfast eggs I crush ghost bones and beaks
and send in tongue-loads of unborn idea-chicks:

Limber lives made and unmade, thought and lost,
the twisted dead of daily holocausts.

Bland golden ovals, suns to fuel internal war,
as if either saved or wasted lives meant more.

Willed to eat without an appetite,
I hope vindictive deaths are right.

Dust, No Wind

Dust, No Wind

Your mind is full of things you can’t control.
If only you could drift in dreams.  You toss.
On another continent a rose unfolds.
You stare across the ceiling, feeling lost.

A soldier lays her rifle on the ground.
Others clatter bullets in a bucket.
You curl up on your bed as if on frozen ground.
A woman ducks a slap and seems to smirk.

Thomas David Lisk

Thomas David Lisk’s poetry, fiction, essays, and journalism (news, reviews and features) have been widely published.  Recent work has appeared in LIT, Massachusetts Review, Hotel Amerika, and Lungfull! His published books include These Beautiful Limits (Parlor Press, 2006) and Tentative List (a) (Kitchen Press Chapbooks, 2008). He teaches literature and occasionally journalism at North Carolina State University.

These Beautiful Limits (Free Verse Editions)

Description The poems in These Beautiful Limits delight in the transparency-and the obliquity-of language. Invested with a "jocoserious" sensibility, they explore the borders of language to see the ways in which language defines identity-not merely the language of meditation and philosophical inquiry, but also the quotidian language of everyday life that hovers on the edge of forgetfulness. The collection, which culminates in a long poem, "Hemp Quoits," takes as its premise the assumption that the borders of identity are permeable with all the languages the self encounters on a daily basis.

cover of These Beautiful Limits (Free Verse Editions)author: Thomas David Lisk
ASIN or ISBN-10: 1932559965
binding: Paperback
list price: $12.00 USD
amazon price: $19.12 USD


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