My Review:

For years, Sean Meriwether has served as editor of two of the most cutting-edge web magazines out there: Outsider Ink (now shuttered) and Velvet Mafia: Dangerous Queer Fiction.  During his time with both markets, Meriwether has found exceptional literature by some of the best writers working. Occasionally he’s also thrown one of his own works into the mix and that is how I first discovered Meriwether as an author in his own right. Over the years, Meriwether has been amassing an enviable body of work and that, my friends, is a very good thing for us.
 

How did you feel about the Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold?

s w i f t



Swift as the elk they pour along the plain;
Swift as the flying clouds distilling rain.
Swift as the boundings of the youthful row,
They course around, and lengthen as they go.

—Thomas Chatterton

going

we say that we ”hop aboard” a plane,
most often though, more like we wait and wait and wait
then sullen and slow-tempo, we walk on the deck like
schoolkids off to lunch. it is still though, travel—
the giant wings and thundering jet engine that
spirit us into a sea-like sky via the growing loud and
powerful din akin to a chord change in the middle
of pop remix: this is the sight and sound of flight.

it’s a modern thing, a boyhood thing, I still want for a
scramjet, certainly, supersonic combustion below wings
carrying the massive plane at Mach 6 like some very
errant rocket yet in control so sublime, landing lights
blinking like a thousand fresh little kitten eyes in this
mighty spectrum of sky.

to where do we fly? —everywhere. the plane’s stolen
thunder not only from sailing-ship but also map.

nowhere is far anymore:
we’re everywhere now.

***

being

Truckee though hides from planes:
it’s a California that isn’t SF(O) or LA(X),
far away and covered in the most pure snow
ever, white perfect, as soft as fur, as crystal as
lovely glasses on the posh bar of the Empire Hotel.
But we are far from a New York, a London—this is
the other lands, the places not filmed or written so much
as this is wild places that have still brought in human interest, the touch of soft skin to rough land.
we go right over the top, we fly corsair over the snow.

I’m up, this is morning
and all around me is a devil of a landscape,
a perfect bowl like the one my grandmother had
Jordan almonds in, a sinister slope like the side of
an architect’s drafting triangle. Teeeeeeeeeeeeeerik:
I brought you up with me ’cause Ohio boys do know
their snow. only geography can ever get the best of me.

we fly.
this is ours. and we fly.

this is what I do best in life—
I am sorry it's not big money it's not history
it's not adroit nor the well of words at cocktail parties
but this is what I do best in life we do this as our love.