Notes For Further Study

I like your hair, clothes, car—call me!

Notes For Further Study

By Christopher Salerno

 

You are a nobody

until another man leaves

a note under your wiper:

I like your hair, clothes, car—call me!

Late May, I brush pink

Crepe Myrtle blossoms

from the hood of my car.

Again spring factors

into our fever. Would this

affair leave any room for error?

What if I only want

him to hum me a lullaby.

To rest in the nets

of our own preferences.

I think of women

I’ve loved who, near the end,

made love to me solely

for the endorphins. Praise

be to those bodies lit

with magic. I pulse

my wipers, sweep away pollen

from the windshield glass

to allow the radar

detector to detect. In the prim

light of spring I drive

home alone along the river’s

tight curves where it bends

like handwritten words.

On the radio, a foreign love

song some men sing to rise.

 

 

About the Poet

 

Christopher Salerno was born on June 13, 1975, in Somerville, New Jersey. He received an MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College.

 

Salerno is the author of Sun & Urn (University of Georgia Press, 2017), winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize; ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), winner of the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize; Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), winner of the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize; and Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006).

 

In the judge’s citation for the Georgetown Review Poetry Prize, D. A. Powell writes, “Salerno rifles through our empty wallets to show how much we’re missing. These poems are mystical transactions of body and soul, as dark as Faust and as illuminating.”

 

Salerno has also received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He currently serves as an editor at Saturnalia Books and teaches at William Paterson University. He lives in Caldwell, New Jersey.