Elephants & Butterflies

fellowships from the Arts and Science Council, the Eastern Frontier Society, the MacDowell Colony, and the Seaside Institute, Alan Michael Parker teaches at Davidson College, where he is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing, and at Queens University, where he is a Core Faculty member in the low-residency M.F.A. program.

His prose appears regularly in journals including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and Salon.

Alan Michael Parker is the author of four previous collections of poems, Days Like Prose, The Vandals, Love Song with Motor Vehicles, and A Peal of Sonnets, and a novel, Cry Uncle.

I have burgled I am done.

vaulted great room

Hang your keys

but not yourself:

quit your job and all

the other jobs that aren’t jobs.

Go to Greece.

Elytis writes, “It is correct to give

the unknown its due.”

BIRTH. MUD. HYACINTH.
Car keys, office keys, house keys

dangle from their chain on a hook—

I’m a hanged man!

and I can see her son

happy there, at last,

fidgety in the bleachers.

Who left the seat up?

The language of peace

becomes a weapon of war.