THE LAST PRINCE CONCERT
(Fox Theatre, Atlanta, 2016)
April 14: same night Lincoln got shot
and the Titanic hit the iceberg
Four planets in retrograde
show delayed a week already
cycles of the moon emblazoned
across his purple silk pyjamas
The scepter he walked with
not an affectation
but an affirmation
of his majesty
A talisman against the agony
in his knees and hips
for which he was taking
black-market fentanyl
likely during the same
astonishing ninety minutes
I spent under a faux sky
of twinkling yellow stars
listening to him force
himself to be vulnerable
in front of strangers
who were affected
by his final strangeness
& singularity
in ways they could
never quite articulate
in ways they would
wake up to years later
feeling both an absence
and expansion
of the world they
felt and believed in
rain that breathes
snow that falls upwards
a new spectrum of color
equal parts
light
sound
electric intercourse
and water
JEFF FALLIS is a poet and critic who lives in Athens, Georgia, and teaches at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Oxford American, James Baldwin Review, and elsewhere.
Read more by Jeff Fallis in B O D Y:
Essay in the June 2020 issue
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
New poetry by Matthew Olzmann, Vítězslav Nezval, Leanne Drapeau, Andrea Jurjević, Sheila Dong, Richard Jackson, Ondřej Buddeus, Jeff Fallis, Stephen Scott Whitaker. Fiction by Julia Kissina, Pavol Rankov, and E.J. Schwartz. Reviews and essays by Ailbhe Darcy, Burt Kimmelman, Chris Crawford, Stephan Delbos, Michael Stein, Rob A. Mackenzie. Art by Khari Johnson-Ricks.
At the heart of this otherwise light-hearted collection are a set of relationships with archetypal men – the lover, the father, the rapist – which are explored with great care and seriousness.
You either believe Kent Johnson exists or he doesn’t. Neither is true. In his poems, translations, conceptual acts anchored on the page, Kent Johnson is there and not there.
Khari Johnson-Ricks is a New Jersey-based artist and DJ who paints, makes zines, and videos. Jessica Mensch caught up with him to talk about his art.
"There is little financial reward in publishing poetry but a great deal of satisfaction" - Rob A. Mackenzie on the origins and history of Blue Diode Press
It's a story of the fight for self...and a shout out to anyone who feels alone and is struggling to find value in that, too.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
Mark Terrill's charming, masterful, workaday, transcendental lyric poetry is more compelling than ever.
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
