And he said, sure, to the devil, as long as I never stop
wanting. He was not caught between angels, but held
mouthfuls of them that fell out whenever he laughed
too hard. He loved those laughs that came from the gut,
that made the tendons taut across the hip bones ache;
loved how his angels had to be retrieved from the chins
and shoulders and lapels and breasts and hair of those
he'd been talking to. He had to do this surreptitiously,
the gathering of his angelic horde -- seeming to sweep
a curl behind a woman's ear, dusting some feigned food
off a chum's tie. And always, the residue of whatever'd
been said lingered in the room until someone opened
a door to leave or enter, and then it was gone:
and his belly stopped aching and the angels nudged
between his teeth and into sleep. Of his smile, people
said it was devilish, and it was, it was, oh, it was indeed.
Laura McCullough
Laura McCullough holds an MFA in Writing and Literature from Goddard
College. She has been a New Jersey State Arts Council Fellow, won a
Geraldine R. Dodge Scholarship to attend the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, and was the 2005 Prairie Schooner Merit Scholar in Poetry at
the Nebraska Summer Writers Workshop. She attended the 2005 Bread Loaf
writers conference as a contributor. She has published poems widely in
literary magazines and journals such as Nimrod, Potion, Hotel Amerika,
Gulf Coast, Nightsun, Iron Horse Quarterly, Boulevard, The God Particle,
Poetry East, Confluence, Exquisite Corpse, Word Riot, Tarpaulin Sky, and
others. Her first collection of poems, The Dancing Bear, was published in
February, 2006 by Open Book Press with jacket blurbs by Stephen Dunn,
Li-young Lee, and BJ Ward. She delivered a paper, In Defence of Shelley:
the New Science of Mirror Neurons and its Implications for a Theory of
Poetics at The Mid Americans 2005 Winter Wheat Writing Festival in
Bowling Green. She is a professor of writing at Brookdale Community
College in NJ where she chairs the Visiting Writers Series.
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. - T.S. Eliot
