Affect or Effect for You

I can’t tell the difference. Vowels
trapped in my lint screen.
I pick up a sheet of paper which only
moments before was as
blank as the white of an egg.
Now there’s a picture of your face and
an old telephone number.
What good is an old number? I try to
act like it doesn’t effect [sic] me,
here among these crumpled notions,
and my, you know, deathless affection.



Chapbook Love

Just a shorter version,
just a cut and a paste,
just a staple, something
we all need, just a
few fewer words, a be-
ginning and an end,
a coherency if not cogency,
just this brief candleflame,
just a little chapbook love.



Do the Jerk

Put the best Pynchon in no particular order.
Let the cat know that you will be lying
doggo for the next few years.
And the women on the telephone will have
to hang on
every word. This is the bye and bye. And, one
more thing: leave the TV tuned
to the sunset and your head turned to the sound
of everybody’s sister’s keening.
The hymn for today is Number 666, at last.



© Corey Mesler

Bio: I have published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Adirondack Review, Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, H_NGM_N, The American Drivel Review, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Cellar Door, Heat City Literary Review, Ghoti, Cranky, Three Candles, StorySouth, Canopic Jar, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Mitochondria, Mars Hill Review, 13th Warrior Review, Monkeybicycle, Arkansas Review, Stirring, Ampersand, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review, Hobart, Piplit, Bullfight, Potomac Review, Big Muddy, Slant, Texas Poetry Review, Rockhurst Review, Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Ducts, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Mid-American Poetry Review,  Dust, Cotyledon, Iodine, Snakeskin (England), The Melic Review, Thema, Kumquat Meringue, Blue Unicorn, The Spirit that Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, BlazeVox, Concrete Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International, others. I have work in the anthologies Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (Breakaway Books), Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Press) and others. I have been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize.

I have these poetry chapbooks available:  Piecework and For Toby, Everything for Toby, from the Wing and a Wheel Press, Chin-Chin in Eden, from Still Waters Press, and Dark on Purpose from Little Poem Press. Four more are due in 2006: Short Story and Other Short Stories, from Parallel Press, The Hole in Sleep from Wood Works, The Heart is Open from The Rooftop Series, and Following Richard Brautigan from Plan B Press.

One of my short stories was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel.

My novel-in-dialogue, Talk, was published by Livingston Press in 2002. Raves from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham.  My forthcoming novel, We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, is also from Livingston Press. Kind words this time from George Singleton, Marshall Chapman, Marshall Boswell and others.

I've been a book reviewer (for The Commercial Appeal, BookPage, The Memphis Flyer), fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With my wife I own Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.