Paul Dickey


Belladonna Lilly
	
Caravaggio knows passion,
but his chiaroscuro means nothing 
to a blossoming amaryllis:

its crimson paper linen is scented,
               bursts open like a firework.
               A poet might cry belladonna lily.

               He scrapes dried clots of reds
               off canvas linen to birth such a poet 
               who desires even as deeply

in naked shadow and light, but a quill 
and ink too are nothing to 
               the blood amaryllis 
               the table knows. 



An Ecclesiastical Sunday in Mexico 

In Guadalajara, 
               a Yankee tried to buy
               tequila, 
                              even mariachi, 
and a sombrero. 
               A Tapatío said no dice,
               maybe manana?

                              Everyone
leaning on la iglesia
               was either a priest 
                              or a poet.
Four million las personas
               enjoying the weather.
Do you want to be a bother?

Yankee had no tomorrow,
               needed to be 
                              back to work
in San Diego. 

At the Plaza de las Armas,
               the bronze bandstand 
                              stood empty.
               I watched soccer —
no points for hours

                              and dreamed —
                              of tomorrow
               with Jose Cuervo,
and a train with an open bar
               all the way to Amatitán.

Paul Dickey won the 2015 Master Poet award from the Nebraska Arts Council. Paul Dickey's first full length poetry manuscript They Say This is How Death Came Into the World was published by Mayapple Press in January, 2011. His poetry and flash have appeared in Verse Daily, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, Southern Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Pleaides, 32Poems, Bellevue Literary Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other online and print publications. A second book, Wires Over the Homeplace was published by Pinyon Publishing in October, 2013.

More info is available at the author's new website: https://pauldickey9.wix.com/paul-dickey

 
 

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