The sad hallways, tunnels, lightless bodies passing, machines humming
in rooms, archives of faded yellow manuscripts, broadsides, records of
the dead and the newly born, film reels turning to vinegar, voices, faces,
landscapes in a panoramic gasp tumbling into canvas bins loaded up with
hollow canisters, where hunched up old rootless scholars with little check-
out slips witness dramas running through ratchet teeth that eat you alive
in the darkroom under the big clock like a storm of correspondences
sinking through layers earthwise into the great sea of dreaming, a doorway
opening like a film cell blossoming as it burns on the projector light.
Douglas Cole has published six collections of poetry and the novel, The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in several anthologies as well as journals such as The Chicago Quarterly Review, Poetry International, The Galway Review, Bitter Oleander, Chiron, Louisiana Literature, Slipstream, as well Spanish translations of work in La Cabra Montes. He is a regular contributor to Mythaxis, an online journal, where in addition to his fiction and essays, his interviews with notable writers, artists and musicians such as Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), Darcy Steinke (Suicide Blond, Flash Count Diary), and Tim Reynolds (T3 and The Dave Matthews Band) have been popular contributions. He also writes a regular monthly column called “Trading Fours” for Jerry Jazz Musician and has recently been named the editor for “American Poetry” in Read Carpet, an international, predominantly Spanish-language journal produced by Maria Del Castillo Sucerquia from Columbia. In addition to the American Fiction Award, he was awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Editors’ Choice Award for fiction by RiverSedge, and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart and Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com/.
JMWW 