3 Poems by Louis Gallo

 CREDO QUIA ABSURDAM EST

                       --Tertullian

And I don’t believe precisely because
It’s absurd, because the rational mind
Forbids it.  How absurd is that,
One preposterous as the other?
I’ll change my mind tomorrow of course
Since absurdity is a two-way street
With no stop signs or red lights

Or runaway truck ramps.

SECRETS

            You wouldn't want these old secrets,
            dulled by their own patina of sorrow and deceit,
            unearthed by prim young technicians who employ
            not divining rod nor hunch nor pure love,
            like mad Schliemann hungering toward the tomb
            of Priam, but the cool precision of gauges
            and instruments which can extract voltage from pain:
            you want them excavated by craven fool, traitor,
            whiskey priest, whore and whore-monger, fallen angel,
            trustees of whatever quivers in midnight sweats--
            the slit wrist, empty bottles of booze and pills,
            gas leaking from unlit ovens--
            you want a custodian of secrets like yourself,
            knowing in your blood that instruments
            tell far greater and more beautiful lies,
            measure only what can be measured,
            will never glimpse the real Jerusalem
            where flowers bloom when gazed upon
            and you breathe not air but cream
            and no amount of money or pleasure
            can ever change your mind.
 
 

 
                     VIEW WITH A ROOM
               
                      I stare from my office window
                      at the fiery, brazen rectangle
                      of world, this official view
                      glowing with insane leaves
                      of autumn.
                                  A girl in blue jeans
                      slouches on a bench under one
                      of the blood red trees.  Gold
                      seeps out of her braided hair.
                      She reads a book and does not
                      notice me noticing her.
                                  May her book be of love
                      and magic, the fate of man,
                      man evolving into soul,
                      poetic but whole,
                      mathematical, deeply comic
                      yet sad as the sea.
                                     May it prompt her
                      to turn and smile at me,
                      come washing through my window
                      with the sudsy light.          

Bionote

Three volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant and Clearing the Attic, are now available.  Three forthcoming volumes, Crash, Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent, will be published in the near future.  His work will appear in Best Short Fiction 2020 forthcoming. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” will be published in Storylandia.  His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic,, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth,  Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others.  Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books:  A New Orleans Review.  His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of an NEA grant for fiction.  He teaches at Radford University in Radford, Virginia.