SOME EXITS
SOME EXITS TRAVIS CEBULA
TRAVIS CEBULA lives in
ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-6
9
50695
780980 165036
www.monkeypuzzleonline.com
MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS
Golden, Colorado with his wife, Shannon. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talking River Review, Bombay Gin, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, The Strip, Whrrds, Eleven Eleven, The Bathroom, and Monkey Puzzle. In 2008 he was a finalist for the Third Coast Poetry Prize.
TRAVIS CEBULA
Travis Cebula’s poetry is a visual and auditory convocation of images, a celebration of sight and sound both beautiful and tragic at once. From “interstate to pasture,” an adventure awaits you in Some Exits.
SOME EXITS
TRAVIS CEBULA
SOME EXITS
SOME EXITS
TRAVIS CEBULA
MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS BOULDER, COLORADO
Copyright Š 2009 by Travis Cebula All rights reserved
Cover Photo by Travis Cebula Cover & Book Design by Nate Jordon and Travis Cebula
ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-2
Monkey Puzzle Press 3116 47th St. Boulder, CO 80301 www.monkeypuzzleonline.com
For Shannon
“...look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.�
Tom Stoppard
Publisher’s Note I founded Monkey Puzzle Press in 2007 during my graduate studies at the Jack Kerouac School of Naropa University. During my time there, I recognized I was surrounded by a sea of talent – much of it undiscovered in the world at large. In order to create a platform to exhibit such talent, and create a community to support it, I decided to develop a publishing company and a literary arts journal – Monkey Puzzle. I’ve been fortunate to receive and publish work that continually pushes the boundary of contemporary American literature, of which Travis Cebula is an essential part of, and the first to trust me with exhibiting his work. Travis’ poetry is a visual and auditory convocation of images, a celebration of sight and sound both beautiful and tragic at once. With “fanciful flames,” his “message [is] fast” and visceral. With pen in one hand, the other on the steering wheel, and “eyes squinted…facing the road ahead,” Travis takes the reader on a journey through our environment both natural and industrialized. From “interstate to pasture,” an adventure awaits you in Some Exits.
Nate Jordon April 11, 2009 Boulder, Colorado
vii
Some Exits
Some Exits
White
marble cold wind winter in Boulder
white fog, snow
smoke drifts off stone chimneys
sharp with a smell like weeds
caught and smoldering
on catalytic converters
3
Some Exits
Driving South in Winter following Eisenhower’s asphalt legacy doing 80 through Colorado Springs the interstate lashed a river of brown morning mixed slush and gravel drunken expressionist hurled sticky paint mag-chloride classic down the windows of my car fanciful flames, their message “fast” or Woody Woodpecker a brown badge mocking dirt decal aerodynamic as the 1950’s with cigar clenched and eyes squinted grimly facing the road ahead
4
Some Exits
Some Exits 1 some exits are marked solely with numbers a fading dirt road grovels west to the Sangre de Cristos and a row of mailboxes leans on the verge their posts wedded with baling wire huddled refugees in tin babushkas torsos failing but strong enough together to stand in the settling dust
7
Some Exits
Some Exits
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Elizabeth Robinson, Sara Nolan, Jenny Henry, and Nate Jordon for all their help in the evolution of Some Exits. The creation of a book - even one this modest - needs an accumulation of hard work, love, and community to come to fruition. You have all provided the nurturing it needed, and I am grateful.
33
SOME EXITS
- Elizabeth Robinson Author of The Orphan & Its Relations
Golden, Colorado with his wife, Shannon. His poems, photographs, and stories have appeared in The Talking River Review, Bombay Gin, Apothecary, In Stereo Magazine, The Strip, Whrrds, Eleven Eleven, The Bathroom, and Monkey Puzzle. In 2008 he was a finalist for the Third Coast Poetry Prize.
ISBN 978-0-9801650-3-6
- Sara Nolan
50695
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics 9
780980 165036
www.monkeypuzzleonline.com
MONKEY PUZZLE PRESS
“Travis Cebula’s poems are often as exquisitely spare as the landscapes they contain. More than exits, these pieces are entrances. The poems follow a trajectory from a dirtied Eden to anywhere that is also a poignant and particular somewhere. His verse is a form of mimicry of the variegated contour where terrain and capitalism collide; these are small elegies to the land that precedes us and will remain, however wasted, after our exit.”
TRAVIS CEBULA lives in
SOME EXITS
TRAVIS CEBULA
“Travis Cebula takes the reader on a poetic road trip, a journey whose rhythms shift dynamically between movement and focus. The short, tightly made poems of this sequence speed the reader through an environment that is at once natural and unnatural, gorgeous and degraded. Cebula gives us a new Eden, one that is riddled with such presences as Wal-Mart and Woody Woodpecker. Traveling the necessary byways of poetic thought, Some Exits functions as a Baedeker that leads us through the fragile terrain of contemporary life. ”
TRAVIS CEBULA