Paul Brooke
.JPG)
Paul Brooke holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is a professor of English at Grand View University. He is the author of six books including Light and Matter, Meditations on Egrets, Sirens and Seriemas, Arm Wrestling at the Iowa State Fair, Jaguars of the Northern Pantanal and The Skáld and the Drukkin Tröllaukin. Brooke was nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, won the Iowa Prize for Poetry, was awarded three residencies (one in Iceland) and received an Iowa Artist Fellowship. His writing has been published in The North American Review, The Antioch Review, Scientific American, among many others.
Aftermath
The trauma, ancient and antediluvian, swept basalt lava out in a wide plain.
Hundreds of years passed but every daylava flows from Seljalandsfoss to Brúarfoss:
newlyweds fight over finances, slam doors;a woman vents at a child over nothing;
a driver erupts at a tourist for slowing;a couple ruptures and releases cruel letters.
The accumulation of casualties posits untoldstone cairns, stacked and pointing south,
while the lava fields, jagged and honedlike filet knives, slowly become overgrown
by a thick mat of moss. It rounds the edgesand dulls the threat. When anger cools
and minds quiet, can we see the damage,the catastrophic cost? People walk amongst
this atoll of rocks; comment on the uglytoll of condemnation and isolation,
willows twisted and thrashed by nasty winds.
Hundreds of years passed but every daylava flows from Seljalandsfoss to Brúarfoss:
newlyweds fight over finances, slam doors;a woman vents at a child over nothing;
a driver erupts at a tourist for slowing;a couple ruptures and releases cruel letters.
The accumulation of casualties posits untoldstone cairns, stacked and pointing south,
while the lava fields, jagged and honedlike filet knives, slowly become overgrown
by a thick mat of moss. It rounds the edgesand dulls the threat. When anger cools
and minds quiet, can we see the damage,the catastrophic cost? People walk amongst
this atoll of rocks; comment on the uglytoll of condemnation and isolation,
willows twisted and thrashed by nasty winds.
