From the Publisher: “We are proud to announce the release of John Repp’s Star Shine in the Pines, the first title in Volume 6 of our Editor’s Series, and John’s third chapbook with Seven Kitchens Press.”—Ron Mohring, Publisher (Seven Kitchens Press)
More info About the Author: John Repp grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey. A poet, fiction writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania, Repp is the author of nineteen collections of poetry and short fiction, including two earlier chapbooks from Seven Kitchens Press (Madeleine Wolfe: A Sequence and Big Conneautee); The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020 (Broadstone Books); Fat Jersey Blues (University of Akron Press); and Heart of Joy: Stories (March Street Press).
Author Site
Running Past Lloyd & the Peepers
Once upon a time, I ran through the squeal-whistle shrill
of the peepers past what had always been Lloyd’s trailer
& the field across the road where last July 4 Lloyd chased
his screaming, near-naked kids with a lawn tractor belching
blue smoke in the roiling midst of which I waved to Lloyd
& his oblivious kids & his wife waving as she roasted
five hot dogs pierced with pointed sticks (each braced
on a three-brick stack), the all-but-dead bonfire billowing
smoke that nearly obscured the untrimmed-log addition
Lloyd had joined to the trailer by means of a wizardry
forever beyond me. In a may-as-well-be-mythical time,
I’d come home after a complicated time away to run past
a bearded someone feeding Lloyd’s fire pit trash bags
swollen with what seemed clothes or bedding, an oily,
reeking swirl of turbid smoke-devils enveloping me
as I waved at the oblivious stranger & never broke stride,
the peeper-squeal filling the woods that within a dozen
footfalls crowded the roadsides again. Lloyd’s panel van
didn’t tilt in the two-track, nor did his tractor squat
under the lean-to. The three stumps he pulled a spring ago
to make more garden still lay by the drainage ditch
& I never again saw anyone on that plot of ground.
Poem Beginning With a Line from Dean Young
I’ve never been in much of a car crash,
but the nah-just-gimme-the-cash
episode at Wheat & Delsea did just burst
from starless, medieval dark into bloom
florid as the peonies behind the Zen House,
“crash” for the first time in human literacy
an aromatic hillock of richest loam,
a rainbow somehow arcing over Newfield
despite the flinty cold & black clouds
swollen with blizzard, the first blizzard
in those climes since 1882, so thank God
The Lager had a generator so the deal
could be sealed over quarter-a-game pool
& a pitcher of Piels. Omniscience is nothing
if not hyperbolic, no? Gravid with laughter,
a relaxed haggle over details before rattling home.
Prose Ode: Peepers Among the Swamp Willows
Kathy & I stand arm-in-arm swaying a little on the porch as the evening deepens, the acrid aroma of the warming creekside plopping me for a few seconds in the muck along the Blackwater, but across this road runs the Big Conneautee, a meandering brook as home as back home but for Kathy a first home since the leisurely current carries water from French Creek, a river (mostly) that’s everywhere around here as for me Kathy is & always has been. In a book I didn’t know we had, she’s found that chorus frogs make the peeper-shrill that thrills us near to swooning (in the nineteenth-century sense) each oncoming night of the new spring. How gratifying to think all this music! We can’t help but call what our thousands of tree frogs do “singing” nor to cling to “our” for we are the ones whose eyes are wet, whose ears have learned to distinguish among the tones & micro-tones of the overwhelming chorus, whose minds empty sometimes simultaneously, whose tongues hover between our slackened jaws till it’s time to go inside & luxuriate in more of what our senses bring us.
Previously:
Four poems from The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020 by John Repp
These poems are published here courtesy of the poet and publisher and should not be reprinted without permission.
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