C. Russell Price

On Missing My Lover Who Agreed With The Concept Of Past Lives, I Read Moby Dick

I hoped for a parti-coloured resurrection
dragging me by the legs, by crowds of water
gazers. I had been his wife,
the dint, the Nantucket craft, November
in my soul. Landsmen delineate chaos;
sentinels blend green fields gone.
That place: the sense of weight
and pressure of voices all over
the house. His belted coral,
his substitute pistol thrown over
me. I found all the Time
whipping me. No help for it--
it’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.
Stir his bitter sigh one single inch.
With his upper hand circulation off, I can
only hear a great rattling of coaches.
Old Craft, Great Original—nothing was
to be heard. This is the price you risk
to drive a nervous man from the stream.
The first dead American harpoon,
however wild, explains our mystery.
Some people are nothing particular.
I lost myself at the feet
of your besmoked coffin
entering the gable-ended sea.

​

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On Reading a Copy of Pushkin I Stole from My Childhood Rapist, a Cento

He dadled me as a small boy,
produced a haze in me. I was
just 9 years of age, soul still blossoming-out.
I don’t know why.
My kith, my kin, three whole hours--
one customary grief each hour, each day.
A roar of violins, violent surging,
just another dumb moon over a dumb horizon.
His thievish mouth all in a blaze
for sport, for the crumbled sofa.
Here there’s no conscience; here no sense.
He killed eight years in such a style.
I learnt new sadness, unkind terror
and its consolation. How to hiss
him off. Who would have thought it?
I’ve no one here who comprehends me.
I drink in the midnight.
I walk the shore, I watch the weather,
I see him in dream: pale transcript
of a vivid master. How well he knew
the way to hurt. I only write like this,
you know, because I’m grieving still.
I might have said a word and then thought
day and night and thought again about one thing:
when will the devil come for you?
I tell my early life, unlock my tongue.
All right, you want my resurrection:
thank God, you had no inclination to blow your brains out.

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C. Russell Price is a Lambda fellow, Ragdale fellow, Literary Death Match champion, and a Windy City Times 30 Under 30 honoree. They are the author of Tonight, We Fuck the Trailer Park Out of Each Other (Sibling Rivalry Press) and are currently at work on a full length poetry collection (HUMAN FLESH SEARCH ENGINE) and a collection of essays (everyone is doing it; they just aren’t telling you). Price, originally from Virginia, now lives and teaches poetry in Chicago.