Five Poems

by Cody Walker

The Bitter Oleander Press

“We demand a serious poetry.”

However, we’ll accept a whimsical fiction, a bemused memoir, a fanciful biography, a pleasantly muddled lyric essay. In times of sorrow, cast lightness upon us! In bed, tell us jokes.

Everything I Say or Write Is a Poem

I glance at my beloved in the gathering gloam.
Poem.

ani’s freaking out. can u come home?
Poem.

End-of-Semester Remarks

I come to you today as someone who grew up in the Roger Moore era of the James Bond films. Who watched Welcome Back, Kotter on a beanbag chair. Who ate baloney boats toasted in a toaster oven.

What can I tell you that hasn’t already been inscribed on a grain of rice in a curio cabinet?

At twelve, I had the best baseball game of my life. I hit for the cycle: 5 for 5, with an extra double. At eighteen, I under-tipped a porter at O’Hare International Airport.

So that’s everything. Portfolios are due tomorrow and can be slid under my office door. Good luck!

Good Life or Bad Life?

Good life, of course—but
then you realize you need to
choose “good life” at five-

minute intervals
forever. And if you don’t . . .
well, then, bad life, the

same bad life you’ve had
since four months before Sgt.
Pepper’s was released.

On His 64th Birthday

George Saunders wanders to Flanders. He launders his sweater, slanders Kim Clijsters (“Henin was better”), maunders on about salamanders. Beauty of nature twaddle. Raise a bottle.

Cody Walker lives in Ann Arbor with three humans and a cat. Nearly twenty years ago he wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on poetry and jokes. These days he directs the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan.