A Web Chapbook from The Literary Review   

Gary Fincke
The hot spots are stars
which drift far from where
the earth once opened,
allowing a boy
to slide toward fire.
The roots which saved him
are a tourist site.
The town's moved have left
their lots for walking,
their houses landfill.



 Gary Fincke is the Writer's Institute Director and Professor of English at Susquehanna University. He has received five writing fellowships form the Pennsylvania Arts Council, a PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, and a 1995 Pushcart Prize for poetry. New work has appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Press, The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, and Shenandoah. He has published more than ten books. His most recent poetry collection is Inventing Angels (Zoland Books, 1994). His second short story collection, Emergency Calls, was published by the University of Missouri Press in 1996, and his novel The Inadvertent Scofflaw by Yardbird Books in 1998.

A Work by Gary Fincke:

    THE WEAKNESSES OF THE MOUTH

    There were punishments for the weaknesses
    Of the mouth. Two uncles had killed themselves
    With salt and fatty meat; an aunt had slaughtered
    Herself with sugar. "Each of them knew,"
    My mother said, but I was growing
    Into the bone-stunting of tobacco
    And candy's pimples, "God's way," according
    To my mother, who warned me about
    The pack of pink gum I found and chewed,
    That there were dope dealers who seeded
    Desire with good fortune, waiting for
    The next day of need, that gum, alone,
    Enough to empty my mouth of teeth.
    I stopped talking, then, about the warm dance
    Of tongue and lips, the moistures driven
    By the heart. The first beer I swallowed
    Poured warm from three bottles I found
    In the half-razed house where old rubbers
    Told me there were willing girls nearby.
    I had such weakness I finished the fourth
    Long-opened bottle, stepped, minutes later,
    Through the lost heat register's empty hole
    And stuck at my shoulders instead of
    Tumbling to cellar's glass and nails.
    It was the last polio summer,
    Seven years until my first cold beer,
    Reversing the Pharaoh dream, famine first,
    Refusal urging my mouth to open.


    (also appears in the spring 1998 issue of the Southern Review)

Selections from Gary Fincke's work:

Poetry, Part I

Poetry, Part II

Poetry, Part III - The Doors of Hell



Email Gary Fincke