Check out the Fun & Games Facebook page, on which, every 17 days, starting May 31, 2010, I’m posting a recording & a discussion of one of the 17 poems from the book. 

My chapbook of poems, entitled Fun & Games, was released by Finishing Line Press on July 24, 2009. It is available for ordering from Finishing Line Press and on Amazon. You can also order copies directly from me by emailing me at cherijohnson33@gmail.com. Read more about the book below!

*

The figures who populate Fun & Games are male and female, child and adult, animal and human; but all have in common a playfulness that leaves them, at different turns, in utter happiness, love, and sorrow. Anxious for and thrilled by the possibilities of life, by the attractive if sometimes dark details of experience, the speakers of these poems almost always throw themselves into it all deeply, but just as often are shocked, or at least sobered, by the consequences. I’ve written these poems with a fiction writer’s penchant for drama, but with a poet’s love of music, rhythm, and sound.

*

Challenging intellectually and emotionally moving, these are allusive, carefully crafted poems addressing the world in a distinctive voice wry with wit and resonant with passion. — Eric Trethewey

These moving poems, so full of adult woe and youthful anxiety, are intelligent and prose-like in their movement, yet they are skillfully trimmed and measured. They are a notable debut by a promising young writer. — Paul Zimmer

*

From Fun & Games

Ella’s Dying Wish 

I.

She only hoped that after taking all the trouble to ride a bus to the sad little clinic, positioning herself in the waiting room next to one thunderous cougher after another, and sucking in the air around each of their soggy mouths when she retrieved a Redbook she had purposely let slip, that she didn’t walk outside and, maybe, get hit by a stupid ambulance. Because wouldn’t that be such an ugly way to die, when one had set her heart on tuberculosis.

 

II.

 

“Oh, Ella, you are dying.

You are dying a young woman,

so beautiful!”

 

“Oh, Troy!”

 

III.

 

Today, Ma’am,

it’s against the law

not to take your meds

when you have

this terrible disease.

 

There will be no more beautiful gratuitous dying!

 

There will be no more beautiful!

There will be no more dying!

 

IV.

 

The pills somewhat attractive, on her skirted nighttable, in a small porcelain dish painted with violets … no. Then what? Then grow old? And how long? Would she walk the mall? Ella turned to the window and coughed.

 

V.

 

She turned to the window.

In the living room she heard the song

to “Scooby Doo,” or one of those.

“Keep the children away,” she commanded.

VI.

“Wash my hair, please,” she begged,

one morning when she was weak.

“So that when I’m dead,

Troy might snap some into a locket.”                        Wash     please     hair     my     it’s                       please     so long     so black *