Three Poems by Jéanpaul Ferro

Apartment Building

Life comes alive only at night,

the singers and the workers of it,

the smell of the blood pulp

as it simmers atop the stove,

all these hackneyed kids play-fighting

down in the stairways,

pretty twenty-somethings,

brunettes with their red dresses on,

tired, sitting there on stools round

the corner at the bar,

fighting off madness—

every guy wanting to steal their soul.

The Worried Boats

In Spain , we sat out on balconies all through the late evenings,

a whitish moon floating atop the olive canopy of trees,

your feet touching mine playfully under the table,

brandy stinging our lips, our lips full of nudity,

nude like your skin under your bodice, half-naked like the

uncertainty of my own soul,

lanterns lit up across town; and then there was this rhythmic

singing that went on over on the furthest most streets;

you smiled when you spotted a mother in a window cutting

an apple for her son; you asked me what I thought his name

might be:

            In a hushed tone, I whispered: “Gypsy of darkness.”

The Formal Gardens (Planet Earth)

That afternoon the garden gate had

mistakenly been left open,

the wind creeping in, hot, like a cyclone,

leaving scars and passages of lilac,

cutting blue-topaz across the sky until

it was suddenly drunk and dark,

going around, crushing all the perfectly

pruned borders of the columnar evergreens,

knocking the cypress and bay laurel straight

down,

draining all the fountains until all the waters

of the garden had become like molten ash.

Author’s Bio: Jéanpaul Ferro is a novelist, short fiction author, and poet from Providence, Rhode Island. An 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jéanpaul’s work has appeared on NPR, Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Portland Monthly, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009), Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009) Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011).  He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.  Website: www.jeanpaulferro.com. E-mail: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net.

His latest collection of poetry, Jazz, is now out by Honest Publishing.  Here is a review of it featured in Rattle Magazine: http://rattle.com/blog/2011/06/jazz-by-jeanpaul-ferro/.