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Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem
She sent back the last order, as well.
This time, she shook her head
like a dog in the rain,
like a posh-frock woman
having "a spell."
The brimming broth, she said,
had a bitterness that swelled
and stung between her cheeks,
and across her tongue.
It steamed with the scent
of turmeric and sweat,
a lipstick kiss in the basement
of the Red Grotto Used Bookstore,
of a Dominican girl, half her age,
in skin jeans and red sneakers,
pulling her by the hand
during Summer City Lit Festival
last year.
She claimed she craved the
steaming heat of our menu's
Andean soup,
but bones like razors waited
when she raised the brim
of the bowl to her lips.
Just like the wine she sent back,
she said that the broth bit her lip
with a vicious grin
when she closed her eyes,
opened wide,
leaned in,
and tried to love it
with the whole of her mouth.
Copyright © Edward Doyle-Gillespie | Year Posted 2025
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Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem
An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair
That same shed waits
by the trees.
Waits on its skids
for the lake to freeze,
and the for the creaking
joints of bickering
stoop-shouldered men
as they push it out to the center
of a pool of glass.
It houses the stories of fishing
in winter, pulling sustenance,
wriggling, through chiseled
portals into another realm.
Old men would wait
like death, slow,
their breath
turning to steam
until they could abduct
their prey from the world below.
Trout would flop
with the thickness of a muscled fist,
striking ice like distillery rage unhinged.
They would twist and corkscrew,
mottled black and silver slapping
the frozen pane of the lake,
waiting for suffocation to take them,
as the old men drifted up in
the steam of twice-warmed coffee,
and the willow-the-wisp exhalations
of ribald stories, retold, and finally forgotten.
Copyright © Edward Doyle-Gillespie | Year Posted 2025
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Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem
Daughter of the Sandman
War-story woman stands astride
the country now,
book-store tour bleary now,
author hands aching
from signing the $20.99
paperback professing her father’s
Marne Corps Desert Storm glory now.
Book-tour daughter
lays inside the hotel room now,
calling her shattered dad
across the gulf,
calling the shaking-hands dad man
“Geppetto” because,
when she calls,
he is always in the workshop basement
of her childhood,
still struggling with band saws
against protesting wood.
War-story woman asks the first-draft
question that has tied down
her mind, even during
her best-seller tour,
for so long now:
How well did she write the smell
of a burning man?
The sanding-dad Geppetto,
exhales against his labor,
says that her words were enough
to peel the covers from hard-backed
leathernecks in the Kuwaiti desert,
circa 1990 -
seethes through his teeth,
says how he can smell
the roasted beef of muscle,
sulfur stink of hair,
sticky-sweet spinal fluid
spiraling up
like a black-cloud desert jinn,
how her work makes him
proud, but that, now,
he must hide in his workshop,
in his work,
in this room,
to honor his writer daughter
and build his bookshelves
even wider.
Copyright © Edward Doyle-Gillespie | Year Posted 2025
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Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem
Mojito Conjuring
When the bruja in the red dress
sends me out this time,
it is for the taste of
sour oranges and garlic.
Once, when I plied her
with a cigar called Hoyo de Montyerrey,
she coiled the smoke,
said that I was still feral and untamed,
sent me out for sugar so that
I could learn my true name.
Scythe-swinging, field-slave-singing,
I could not return to her coven of one
until I had learned that my “Suarez”
meant that I was the son of sugar itself –
the child of wild ingenious devouring
the rows of cane like a dragon.
Now, red-dress bruja breathes out
clouds of tobacco *****,
turns the cigar round and round,
tells me to gather garlic and aurantium oranges
so that the sour and the sucre may jibe
together in me,
and leave me properly christened
for when it is time for me to work,
time for me to sweat,
time for me to sing.
Copyright © Edward Doyle-Gillespie | Year Posted 2025
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