Corey Mesler

From Canada

Most of my large family are Canadian,
burly men who drank beer and curled
or played hockey, and comely women,
who were mostly wives and mothers, a
strain of neuroses running through them
like fat marbling a cut of beef, and
I’ve often wondered how I came from
such a clan, with my childhood tormented
by bullies, and my later leftist politics
and love for poetry, and I conclude that
I am born of a moonstruck maiden who
left me as a changeling in the back seat
of my parents’ LeSabre, barreling down
the electric highway, dragging the family
behind like a tail, straight into Memphis,
where I learned not to talk about race or
the heat and humidity, or my love of
poetry or the nature/nurture of my anxiety.


Corey Mesler has published 30 books of prose and poetry and appears in many anthologies, which is somewhat uncommon in Memphis, Tennessee, where, with his wife, he runs one of the oldest bookstores in America.