Douglas Nordfors

Giving Advice

Douglas Nordfors

Hope for the best, and define the best as a watered-down version of heaven. To thank for such nonsense I have a part of the brain that shouldn’t be used, the part that considers a red rose and a red rose and finds one lovelier. Obviously, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I shouldn’t be giving advice, prone as I am to making breathtaking mistakes, like looking for solitude in a public park, like seeing a glob of trash that rainwater glued to a street, and rainwater sticking to a gutter's path, as a reflection of all that happens when people strive to make the world a better place. I should be receiving spiritual guidance from a child sliding down a slide in a public park, should be imagining mothers and fathers forming a chain around the park to prevent disappointment from entering our lives, should be defining a street as an artery that can require cleansing, a stop sign as an interval of peace, a dead end as the mouth of a river, an ocean as a deep humanity filling a breathable society the moon governs with a soft hand.

Douglas Nordfors, a native of Seattle, now lives in Virginia. He has a BA from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from The University of Virginia. Poems have been published in journals as The Iowa Review, Quarterly West, Poetry Northwest, and Poet Lore, and recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Burnside Review, The Louisville Review, Poetry South, Chariton Review, The Hollins Critic, Potomac Review, California Quarterly, 2River, BODY Literature, The Broad River Review, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and others. His three books of poetry are Auras (2008), The Fate Motif (2013), and Half-Dreaming (2020), all published by Plain View Press.