COUNTRY LIFE
by John Stanizzi
It’s freezing and snowing in New York.
We need global warming!”
-The Insurrection Inciter
November wind
crazed raging
boattailed railer
bellows through the trails
and then rain –
nearly black
for two days straight
iridescence vanished
branches’ genuflection
gems lost until
the next slothful silent
eruption of thawed earth
At Thompson’s General Store --
seedbed of Eagleville --
Burnie sorts grain, rustling around the wooden warehouse,
tosses pallets to the roadside by the tracks
near the burned-out caboose –
its scorched indifference
at the foot of the hills
we arrived from a city
that stopped pulsing on the shore
of the scoured river
many years ago
under the misconception
that the foul wind from the hill
could not reach down into our blood
we discovered we were wrong
a spark of destruction
submerged beneath our faces
we tried to leave before the lights dimmed
cursing the sky fluorescent
divertimenti of zircon weighty and fake in the yard
hangdog blueprints curled on the table
Bio: John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections Ecstasy Among Ghosts (Antrim House), Sleepwalking (Antrim House), Dance Against the Wall (Antrim House), After the Bell (BigTable), Hallelujah Time! (Big Table), High Tide – Ebb Tide (Kelsay Books), Four Bits (Grayson Press), Chants (Cervena Barva), Sundowning Main Street Rag, POND (imspired – UK)), and The Tree That Lights The Way Home (Antrim House).
John’s work has been widely published and has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, American Life in Poetry, Praxis, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, The Laurel Review, The Caribbean Writer, Blue Mountain Review, Rust + Moth, Tar River, Poetlore, Rattle, Hawk & Handsaw, Plainsongs, Patterson Literary Review, Potato Soup Journal, and many others.
His work has been translated into Italian and appears widely in Italy, including in El Ghibli, The Journal of Italian Translations Bonafini, Poetarium, and others. His translator is the Italian poet, Angela D’Ambra.
His nonfiction has been published in Literature and Belief, Stone Coast Review, Ovunque Siamo, Adelaide, Scarlet Leaf, Evening Street, Praxis, Potato Soup Journal, The Red Lemon, after the pause, and others.
John is the Flash Fiction Editor of Abstract Magazine TV, and he has read at venues all over New England, including the Mystic Arts Café, the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Hartford Stage, and many others.
For many years, John coordinated the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition for Young Poets at Hill-Stead Museum, Farmington, Connecticut. He was also a “teaching artist” for the national poetry recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud; he spent a decade with Poetry Out Loud.
A former Wesleyan University Etherington Scholar, and New England Poet of the Year (1998), John has just been awarded an Artist Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction -- 2021 from the Connecticut Office of the Arts for work on his new memoir.
He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, Connecticut, and lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry, CT. https://www.johnlstanizzi.com
