https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
Published by Ricardo and Isabel Nirenberg since 1998
Poems by Louis Gallo
SITTING ON THE DOCK OF THE UNIVERSE
Wasted by time, that’s what you meant,
Otis, wasting it as it wastes you,
awash in loss, the tide a sea of memories,
erupting, a mishmash, flooding in, flotsam,
the echo of a song here, another there—
different eras, all eras congealed now,
superimposed as one vast tableau,
faces, that girl, her hair a hurricane
as she passes in the Corvette, winking,
an ancient woman, you on her lap, a child,
reading Encyclopedia Britannica, the section
on butterflies, then dinosaurs, that old man
slapping a rolled-up newspaper on his thigh
as he hastens through the dining room,
the four of us leaving, standing on the back porch
as a basketball-sized meteor sizzles in the sky,
lighting up the darkness, our mouths agape
in almost holy wonder and dread . . .
the nectar snowballs from a shack
on Elysian Fields, Julie’s thigh against mine
as we rehearse Sousa in band class, thirteen
years old, Franklin Avenue, Louis Pendarvis
conducting with a white plastic baton . . .
all of it stored in the museum of your mind.
You never left your home in Georgia,
no one did, Georgia isn’t Georgia, Otis,
nor the Frisco Bay . . . we’re everywhere
and nowhere, glued into this eternal instant.
VOYAGER 2
Ten billion miles out at last count,
headed for Sirius.
When aliens lasso it in
we humans will probably
have become extinct—
but the aliens, ah,
they will plug in their headphones
and be treated to Bach’s
Brandenburg Concertos
which went along for the ride.
How’s that for a swan song!
Seven volumes of Louis Gallo’s poetry, Archaeology, Scherzo Furiant, Crash, Clearing the Attic, Ghostly Demarcation & The Pandemic Papers, Why is there Something Rather than Nothing? and Leeway & Advent. His work appears in Best Short Fiction 2020. A novella, “The Art Deco Lung,” appears in Storylandia. National Public Radio aired a reading and discussion of his poetry on its “With Good Reason” series (December 2020). His work has appeared or will shortly appear in Wide Awake in the Pelican State (LSU anthology), Southern Literary Review, Fiction Fix, Glimmer Train, Hollins Critic, Rattle, Southern Quarterly, Litro, New Orleans Review, Xavier Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Texas Review, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, Baltimore Review, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, The Ledge, storySouth, Houston Literary Review, Tampa Review, Raving Dove, The Journal (Ohio), Greensboro Review, and many others. Chapbooks include The Truth Changes, The Abomination of Fascination, Status Updates and The Ten Most Important Questions of the Twentieth Century. He is the founding editor of the now defunct journals, The Barataria Review and Books: A New Orleans Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times. He is the recipient of NEA grants for fiction and Poets in the Schools. He is now Professor Emeritus at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. He is a native of New Orleans.