Jacket 26 - John Hennessy - New Corinthian: Letter to Paul

My love like love of love petitions deconstruction
My love is fire’s form, flames beyond its function

Government of my love would shame the left-wing fascist
Love to my love is like the jock strap to Priapus

My love is ugly and dignified after Eleanor Roosevelt
My love says nothing and insists its silences are heartfelt

My love mimes Sydney Carton, selfless and misanthropic
My love’s Gospel is by Thomas, incendiary, gnostic

My love is the Minotaur reflected in the bullseye
My love is to dust what sorrow is to pigsty

The hospital of my love is sealed against infection
The language of my love can not bear inflection

My love is nihilism choked with a trombone
My love is a cat sucking marrow from a ham bone

My love is spent like wind through the lupines
My love is over there, saluting from the margins

John Hennessy grew up in New Jersey and studied at Princeton, U. of Texas and U. of Arkansas. His poems appear or will appear in Fulcrum, Salt, Ontario Review, Washington Square, The Yale Review, New Letters, Rattapallax, Pleiades, Poetry Daily and other journals. He lives in Amherst, Mass., with Sabina Murray, PEN/ Faulkner-winning fiction writer, and their children, Nicholas Joseph and Gabriel Carlos.

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