Primer on the Hereafter
by Steve McOrmond
October 2006
88 pages | ISBN: 1-894987-12-8
$17
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In Primer on the Hereafter, Steve McOrmond distills the fleeting beauties and lingering pains of daily life into darkly elegant, elegaic poems. Moving from rural to urban settings, considering the stars, music, and the inanimate objects that share our lives, McOrmond subtly examines concepts of home, loneliness, belonging and worth. With graceful lines he creates startling images and metaphors, where crows are "tuneless/as 10,000 cigarettes" and a young deaf couple can "hardly pay attention to what their hands are saying." This is a compelling collection - smoky and concentrated, it lingers long in the reader's mind.
The Second Coming
There's been some mistake and now
a crowd is gathering - honestly, you
don't deserve the keys to the city, roses
and women's underwear falling at your feet.
You're a bad haircut waiting for a bus.
You're a short order
cook at a greasy spoon, another stained shirt
hurrying to make the night shift.
You're anyone, the sum of memory:
father was a ruined pillar. Mother,
slender vine, inseparable and lonely.
Go jump in the lake - and you did.
You're a faded pair of Levi's, knees
winking at the cameras. You're the future,
neither bright nor certain. The song replaying
in your head doesn't even know its name.
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