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Best Poems Written by Edward Doyle-Gillespie

Below are the all-time best Edward Doyle-Gillespie poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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A Lone Diner at the Snout to Tail Bistro

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.

Details | Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem

An Ice Fishing House, Abandoned, in Need of Repair

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.

Details | Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem

Daughter of the Sandman

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.

Details | Edward Doyle-Gillespie Poem

Mojito Conjuring

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 negro,
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.