ON ECSTASY......................................................................................................................................................ALEXANDER LONG

On Ecstasy

Poem by Alexander Long

I like hearing things before I feel them and the other way around

The disconnect I guess the shadow Listening the scent of Hendrix

The symphony of an oyster sluicing down the throat The hum of horseradish in its wake

And ounce after ounce of Grey Goose erupting In the guts like a rainbow

The scent of a rainbow is dampened wood In August and August sounds like crickets and frogs

Fucking their brains out and sex tastes Like oysters the sea

Looks like laundry on the line Just before a summer downpour

Giddy helpless everywhere

I prefer the Walt Whitman to the Brooklyn To leap from but it makes no difference

I’ve just crushed a mosquito against my ear again And its one-note song tastes

Of iron

I’ve been told dust is my destiny

Hurry up I say

I couldn’t be happier

Alexander Long's third book of poems, Still Life, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2011. He's also published four chapbooks, the most recent being The Widening Spell, an abridged biography of Amerian poet Larry Levis, edited by Jess Smith (Q Avenue Press, 2016). Work appears & is forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, Callaloo, The Chronicle of Higher Education, From the Fishouse, Iron Horse Review, New Letters, Plume, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, & Writers' Chronicle, among others. Long is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, the City University of New York.

Be the writer you were born to be. Get the master’s with magis.

Saint Joseph’s University’s offers evening courses in a flexible Writing Studies M.A. program to help students grow creatively and professionally. If you’re looking for a broad range of courses in a nurturing community environment, you’ve come to the right place. While most programs require students to specialize in a genre, we believe in training writers in a broad range of skills and showing them how to use them in a variety of careers.

Graduate Writing Studies Program

Sample classes include:

• grant writing • screenwriting • magazine writing • fiction, poetry, non-fiction

Apply today!