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    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes
    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes
    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes
    Ebook95 pages31 minutes

    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes

    By Cheryl Dumesnil

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    About this ebook

    The poems in Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes are survival songs, the tunes you whistle while walking through the Valley of Shadows, to keep your fears at bay and your spirit awake. The shadows here are many—cancer, poverty, a lost love, famine, suicide, war, an ever-encroaching existential angst. But so are the saving graces—a drag queen waitress whose "painted-on eyebrows arched like a bridge / toward starlight," "strawberries / grown fat around dimpled gold seeds," Pink Floyd's "'On the Turning Away' sent through my car / radio like the ghost voice of a beloved long dead," black phoebes rattling "winter / thistles, swollen throats percussing: / this is this is this is . . . " Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes reminds us that where there is shadow there must, necessarily, also be light.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Pittsburgh Press
    Release dateNov 18, 2016
    ISBN9780822982005
    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes
    Author

    Cheryl Dumesnil

    Cheryl Dumesnil’s books include two collection of poems, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes and In Praise of Falling (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and the Golden Crown Literary Society Prize for Poetry); a memoir, Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood; and the anthology Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Kim Addonizio. Her stint as a solo mom ended in 2017 when she married her soul mate, Sarah, a.k.a. the Best Stepparent in the World.

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    Book preview

    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes - Cheryl Dumesnil

    PITT POETRY SERIES | Ed Ochester, Editor

    SHOWTIME AT THE MINISTRY OF LOST CAUSES

    Cheryl Dumesnil

    UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

    Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

    Copyright © 2016, Cheryl Dumesnil

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Printed on acid-free paper

    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

    ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-6431-5

    ISBN 10: 0-8229-6431-7

    Cover art and design by Joel W. Coggins

    ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8200-5 (electronic)

    For Marilyn and Robert Dumesnil,

    with relentless gratitude

    Do you have the patience to wait

    till your mud settles and the water is clear?

    Lao-Tzu

    All that noise coming in.

    You have to make use of it somehow.

    Grace Paley

    CONTENTS

    I. GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE

    It’s not the Holy Spirit

    The Flock

    Revolution

    The Red-Shouldered Hawk, the Raven

    When there’s no money left—

    Good Morning Heartache

    Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes

    Colossal Failure of Human Design, We Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Your Death

    Ode to October

    II. AT THE REUNION OF LOST MEMORIES

    Tampons: A Memoir

    Conception Myth

    On Air Guitar, Lip Gloss, and Flat Irons

    At the Reunion of Lost Memories

    When she finally lost the weight

    Ode to Pink Floyd

    Breaking the Broken Things

    III. THE HEART HAS FOUR CHAMBERS

    The Heart Has Four Chambers

    A Thousand Words for Goodbye

    Love Song for the Drag Queen at Little Orphan Andy’s

    Fever Dream

    Last Call

    Coming Home

    Prayer for Beginning

    To the First Person Who Ate an Artichoke

    The Gospel According to Sky

    IV. THAT I COULD KEEP YOU LIKE THIS

    Still Life, Ocean Beach

    In the Ocean Some Survive by Drowning

    The locked box insists

    Some Days Are Skin as Tinfoil

    What You Were Doing Up There

    That I Could Keep You like This

    A Million Silver Minnows

    Halfway Up Devil Mountain

    V. THE ACROBATS OF PITTSBURGH

    The Acrobats of Pittsburgh

    Notes to Myself on the Morning after His Birth

    Diagnosis

    Don’t

    Vocabulary

    Get Ready

    The Problem Is

    How to Swim Naked in a Night Lake

    How to Slice Bananas

    His Currency

    Melodrama of the Suburban Kindergartener

    Instinct

    The Words Are

    Lake Dharma

    Notes

    Acknowledgments

    I. GOOD MORNING HEARTACHE

    It’s not the Holy Spirit

    letting up out of an oil-slicked puddle

    between the tracks on 9th Ave,

    that feathered blur flashing

    toward the N-Judah’s windshield.

    It’s only a rock dove, tail fan

    splayed, pewter wings spread

    wide, reversing direction mid-air.

    But tell me, what better

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