Ken Meisel

Down south, past dirt roads, choke cherry trees, wild flowers & lovers sleeping, fucking, reading, quarreling, making up, I found myself alone, wanting someone I’d lost. In a bar called Last Night’s Stars, I shot pool w / a woman whose life mantra was feeding goats & making wild honey & she wore incredibly sexy summer dresses when she’d dance at the bar at night, shoot pool, hook up. She didn’t want me, I could tell, but we talked literature, recipes & the court & spark of men & women auditioning w / one another & she French kissed me once, to the stunning sound of Faron Young’s Country Girl, told me she wasn’t at all like the girl in the song. She drove a 60' Buick Invicta w/ a concave grill & angry head lights & multi-layered contour sides, making it look like a movement of water down the road. And later, before I drove into Chapel Hill to meet a man who constructed large frames for paintings & for enlarged photographs, she & I kissed again to Marty Robbin’s El Paso & she confessed to me that she believed the particular is sacrificed for satisfaction in the eternal, which was Roland Barthes, & she stripped for me so I could take a triptych of photographs of her posing, fondling her breasts, stretching out across a small blue couch, her lips the color of american holly berries, her delicate twig fingers twilighted w / silver rings & wet round bracelets haloing her wrists & her eyes disinterested, ultimately. & she sipped a cocktail & said, “look, infinity occurs just once.” Blew me a bull’s-eye kiss & the white puff of the smoke from her pistol came from a silver bullet fired straight through my chest. 

Ken Meisel is a poet and psychotherapist from the Detroit area. He is a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, best of the net nominee, winner of the Liakoura Prize and the author of nine poetry collections. His new book, The Light Most Glad of All, was published in 2023 by Kelsay Press. It was reviewed by Tipton Poetry Journal and Trampoline Magazine. Other collections include: Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance (Kelsay Books: 2022) and Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit (Blue Horse Press: 2020). He has work in Crab Creek Review, Concho River Review, San Pedro River Review, Panapoly, Sheila-Na-Gig and The MacGuffin.