George Perreault

George Perreault’s most recent collection, Bodark County, features poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado. He has received awards from the Nevada Arts Council and the Washington Poets Association, and has served as a visiting writer in New Mexico, Montana, and Utah. His poems have been nominated both for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, as well as selected for sixteen anthologies and dozens of magazines.

Self-Medicating

woke still black and knew was never easing
back to sleep, rain fingering the puddles
out under the street light, mind wrapped
in remnants of another morning, what’s
grabbed from the floor in the dark

three feet of snow in the mountains but here
it’s rain, cottonwoods bending by the river,
leaves whetted amber, canary, buff, far
hillsides where grasses grip tight between
hesitant tumbles of rock

river rushes on, chocolate and pewter, mallards
shimmering in the shallows, a single plain and
placid female, her five swains showboating
off to the roiling center and then back
ever cool and nonchalant

my radio’s resting on a classical station,
ducking the news (maybe an update if the
world stumbles to an end), Brahms, Rossini
slide by without words, Ravel, whose lyrics
glide up in some foreign tongue

mostly it’s side streets and slow, places
where traffic’s like the inside of a train set,
lights for each crossing, others’ lumbering
bulk, this regimen I follow holds against
the spiral, against nothing at all