John Domini Online

One of the poems from John's chapbook, The Grand McLuckless Road Atlas, out now on Pedestrian Press/Bicycle Review. This piece won the 2006 Meridian Editors' Prize, and appeared later in anthologies.

Okie Monarchs

I never saw so raped a countryside,
this Oklahoma "City" so-called...

the derricks jacking in and out, obscene
beside the swings, the library... crude rules;

mall posterboard and neon wink their lies
across the Broadway shaft, like mica flickers

across a pit, across the tumbling wrappers...
like condoms, sacks of children's souls... pale

along the median. Never saw a hell
to match this drive-through. When the Monarchs

arrived, they waggled in alternative
rush-hour flow, in cloverleafs mid-air,

among the starving greens of Lowes and Target.
More migrants -- lovely, sure, but only Okies --

they spawn, they go, their wings like hot-rod flames,
some Heineken-green, never saw the like

before... once, in glossy springtime, Cape Cod,
a luna moth, a monster, startled me,
and it was green, and I thought, Dickinson,

gone midnight, strange, her "noon" gone moon; I thought,
Nabokov, sexy lepidopterist,
ripe youth and beauty in his net... Now,

...
these Red-Dirt flyers, scribbling on the air,
it's like a note you jot in mid-commute,

no poem. Autumn's on us, Hallowe"en,
the black and orange... décor that's not unlike

these blossom-cruisers: Little People, up
on brooms, their dance to Satan stained the blood
of sunset; male hooks female; howling mute,

invisible yet vivid upward love coils,
a couple climbing spiral steeps, at work
against the vertigo, a pair of pilgrims...

Contact John Domini

John welcomes word from readers and thinkers: dominijohn51 at gmail dot com.

In 2021 appeared John's 10th book, a memoir, The Archeology of a Good Ragù. Praise came in Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere. Earlier he published four novels, the most recent The Color Inside a Melon, 2019, with blurbs from Salman Rushdie and others. The novel was listed among the year's best. Set in Naples, Italy, it completes a loose trilogy that began with Earthquake I.D. He also has three books of stories, the latest MOVIEOLA! The Millions called this "a new shriek for a new century."

His books have appeared in Italian, and he's done translation himself. He's appeared in anthologies, in all genres, and in Paris Review, New York Times, and other places. Grants include an NEA Fellowship and an Iowa Major Artist Award.

He's taught at Harvard, Northwestern, and elsewhere, and lives in Des Moines with the science fiction writer Lettie Prell.

Photo credit: Camille Renee.