Chris Green will launch Epiphany School with a reading on Oct. 15 in Chicago at DePaul University's Student Center.
Reception 5:30
Reading 6:00
DePaul University’s Student Center
2250 N. Sheffield, #314
Penned with all the wonder and curiosity of a wise child, Epiphany School is not a book for the timid, the slack-minded, the duped or sleeping. These are poems that hold us in their headlights and tap us on our backs in the dark, begging us to notice life and death, the big and small moments of illumination in our lives. Green writes with wings. Each turn of thought and phrase arrives unexpectedly with a poignancy that touches on the revelatory.
New Recruit at the Zoo
I tell my toddler the Afghan leopard
is sleeping and not dead. I don’t know why
I say it that way.
Parents with a son in military dress
ask me to take their photo. They pose
before the pen’s fresco of mountains and blue sky
where a painted river dreams through a painted canyon—
Afghanistan as eternal summer day
made for sleeping by.
Sunlight
lifts him and his parents
and with a little
wise adjustment on my part,
the whole world focuses on the boy’s beret.
“Death, I’m coming,” his little hat calls.
The leopard waits for whatever,
his coat the dark and his spots the patient stars.
I ask the soldier and his parents to stand closer
(I thought they would touch), but they stay
separate and unsmiling, as if staring into fire.
