Bill Church's poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in
Tamaqua, Number One, Icarus, Canvas, Soundings, Coal City Review, Steam Ticket, Big Muddy, and The Western Horseman, among others.  Church holds a B.A. from MWSU, a M.A. from the University of Missouri, and is completing a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas, where his academic concentrations include African American Literature and Creative Writing.
 

Advice to writers: Respect the fundamental urgency of each word, its layered meanings, connotations, simultaneous grammatical roles, emotional freight. Explore, for example, all the meanings of "train." Also, escape from the tyranny and trivia of confessional poetry by fictionalizing poems about characters other than the self. For beginning poets, especially, the tendency to be too close to the subject restricts a poem's (and poet's) potential.  My poem included in this selection, for example, "On Padre Island" is a purely fictional treatment of the old theme of one generation rejecting the mores of the generation that preceded it. I've never shot a goose nor heard stories of an unacknowledged boy hanging himself. But those elements told me they were important to the poem. Fictional poems let me concentrate on the art of the piece --- the "what-if-ness" of a scenario, as opposed to the clichéd notion of "slitting a vein and bleeding on the page" that seems to impede more writers' development than it facilitates.

                                 i

    This I remember: The Missouri flyway, November,

    V strings of snow geese blowing south on the squalls,

    held low by the weight of the wind on their wings,

    so low I could spy their bottomless black eyes sighting

    back down the barrels of my twelve gauge,

    each mighty blast the wrath of some goose god

    that would one day curse me, too, into flight.

    After the hunt, good ol’ boys huddled round

    the glowing stove in Daddy’s gas station and store

    killing hours over cards with nothing but hard

    luck, lies, and hollow liquor bottles to show,

    swapping tales I ought not have heard but had

    to while I mopped floors, stocked shelves, and grew

    into my thinking about things of this world.

    They scoffed sometimes of a wild bastard child —

    brains of a goose, they said, and just as flighty

    as his poor town whore of a syphilitic mother —

    the unclaimed son that any or all of them might’ve sired.

    He hanged himself, they said, from Three Forks Bridge

    at first shooting light, his limbs climbing sky like wings,

    frightening geese back to the polar caps, men swore,

    his mother’s wails spoiling the whole damn season.

                        ii

    It’s fall now, and I bet they’re talking geese back home.

    At nights they’ll lie awake in their beds,

    too excited for sleep cause a curtain of clouds

    falling from Canada is set to lower the sky

    and hold the birds close to rows of gun barrels

    shooting like cane stalks from straw blinds.

    Those same geese, the survivors, they’ll come

    winging in low over the house where I’ve landed,

    soon, maybe Christmas time.

    My wife shoots their pictures.

    My kids pitch them crumbs.

    I haven’t gone near them in years.

                     iii

    Some nights I lie awake and listen

    like I half expect them to scream

    some plea from Daddy back home. 

    And in the spring, when for weeks they beat

    north I say tell him I meant

    him no harm by leaving.

    I would have starved there.

    The geese understand.

    They used sing me to sleep

    and fly me away in my dreams

    to this land of no winter, sand and ocean,

    swimming with people, some like me,

    who came here one hungry time

    from colder places and settled,

    instincts that once guided them home,

    long ago flown.