How did you first engage with poetry?

Poetry Mini Interviews

by Thomas Whyte with Stephen Page:

part two

http://poetryminiinterviews.blogspot.com/2019/08/stephen-page-part-two.html?m=1

Santa Fe Literary Review Issues – with Stephen Page

With a poem by Stephen Page in Volume 13 (2018) — Read on www.sfcc.edu/santa-fe-literary-review/literary-review-issues/

Download the .pdf or ePub to read issue 13 (2018)

Special thanks to Kate McCahill, Nancy Beauregard, and Serena Rodriguez

Except from poem Teresa: My Mask of Day —

“She unwraps and pirouettes before me, holds out her arms,

clasps my hand, ballrooms, tangoes:

She jumps up and down upon the dry earth,

raising dust to form a rain cloud.”

Dear Santa Ana

by Stephen Page

Today I reconnected your telephone-fax one week after I recovered it from the Cattle Thief, and today I spoke with the elderly lady who let her hogs feed free upon your pasture, the eighty-two year old neighbor who begged with palm held out for kindling from your wood. I told her we would speak about the matter later.

A bathroom is bricking up alongside my matera, my plant-enclosed muse room, my idea room, the place where my desk is, the place where gauchos once stopped to take mate in front of the fire and nap-dream meat, the place where I will never again reluctantly leave to piss my daily coffee intake, the place that will soon be my self-enclosed patrón office, the place where I will administer your affairs.

Yesterday I drove to the neighboring town Lobos, to meet and interview a gaucho for potentially filling the role of capataz, but the man who stepped down from the train with his woman had only one eye, losing the other to a horse kick, and his wife a nurse mind you, with five kids. We drank coffee, spoke, and when the woman smiled falsely, I knew. I smiled, shook their hands, paid for their train tickets, and honestly hoped they would not again disembark nor call.

Last week I put new locks on your gates, and all twenty-five hundred acres of you exhaled as if you had been holding your breath for a very long time.

Today I walked the wood near my new home, my new office, my no longer weekend escape from smog and noise of the city, my no longer escape from teaching and students, my no longer muse room. I sat on a log to contemplate the sapid scent of eucalypti. I zipped up my polar-fleece vest, my leather jacket, donned my rancher gloves and noticed a pileated woodpecker scrutinizing me.

Today I chased away rabbit hunters from lot number eight.

*Originally published on Extracts and later included in “A Ranch Bordering the Salty River,” which is published by Finishing Line Press.

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2017 Paddock Review Pushcart Prize Nominations:

Read the nominated poem: https://paddockreview.com/2017/08/04/a-poem-by-stephen-page/
Read the nomination on line: https://paddockreview.com/2017/11/02/2017-paddock-review-pushcart-prize-nominations/