CONLEY LOWRANCE began writing poetry after an aborted career in punk rock. His interest in lyrics and subculture literature eventually led him to the University of Virginia’s poetry writing program where he received his BA in 2012. His poems have appeared in publications put out by Tupelo Press, Columbia Journal, Underwater New York, and Counterexample Poetics, among others.

Currently, he is exploring the intersection of Surrealist poetry and detective fiction while working at Columbia University’s Heyman Center for the Humanities and Society of Fellows. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and four cats. Follow him @ConleyLowrance.

Study of Passerby

He imagines the bodies are ghosts
& that he has dreamt the entire street.
He wonders idly who is sleeping in his old bed.
He walks home in a thin rain, the scene
populated with fruit stands & taxidermied birds.

Farther down the street, two figures appear,
blocking the sidewalk—slender figures
that whisper with fidgeting mouths. Miles away,
a piano sinks to the bottom of a river,
an enormous dog walks timidly without its leash.

Routine

In the mornings, we must dissect everything.
Look out the window: wet insects are on the glass,
& my skin is foxing—my body, nothing but a map.

Ignore the whips of fog coming in through the walls,
the pruning mouths that drift down empty streets.
I am waiting in your chair, folded in anticipation.
I am waiting with my throat parched & your name
corroding my tongue.

Vignette

         The girl enters an empty hotel room. Her tongue, like frayed velvet, runs across her lips. As the door closes, cigar smoke punctuates the scene, & soon we can no longer separate her edges & the dust. From somewhere else—the hallway, a window—we can hear her reciting our names—as if preparing to seduce us or cut our hair.
          Of course—when the lines come into focus—the room is empty. Of course we haven’t noticed the bed has burned down to ash.

If you wish to read the poems in page view, the following link will take you to a PDF – Conley Lowrance Poems

All works published by the Glasgow Review of Books are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License and the journal reserves the right to be named as place of first publication in any citation. Copyright remains with the poet. http://www.glasgowreviewofbooks.com