Cottonwood River Anthology

COTTONWOOD RIVER ANTHOLOGY

Gay Midwestern Realism:
The Death Throes of Romanticism #5 

“They are so jealous 
of anything that is not 
flat! They are jealous gods
that would have the whole 
world flat because they are.”
—Sylvia Plath
"Three Women"
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I suppose I had a typical type of writer’s block—
A sort of frightened Kansas gay imagination 

It’s pretty easy to be engulfed by those—
Paranoid rapid associative leaps being a fag

Str8t sociological and mythical tropes—
Didn’t help me to get it together very much

St8t literature and poetics conspired—
Together to make a Hell of Flatness

"Let us flatten all the souls of Kansas—
Make them as flat as the Tallgrass Prairie"

It’s pretty easy to launder such grossness—
Into symbolic figures of Plains Poetry

The symbolic dimension of the Flat Mind—
Exclusively Fly-Over transcendent & flat 

Embodying all the jealous assumptions of—
An imagined Family of Flat Stoic Existence

The immediate, terrifyingly Flat Present—
Conspiring with lies that can’t be trusted

Moreover, there’s all that male aggression—
That cynical deployment of butchy rhetoric

There was so little space for gay intellect—
Employment & expansion of gay consciousness 

How can one try to transcend such limits—
When one’s artistic self is so fucking Flat?

Closeted by the holders of power—
Crummy "mysteries" of the male flesh

When poetry approaches but never crosses—
The threshold of an active, healthy gay ego?