Jamie Brown

The Joke

Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
The Sonnet Issue

The Joke

These clouds came up from Mexico, their high
whites and grays affixed to the moving blue
by some unknown surrealist in the sky.
Call it “The Bride’s Indecision” or “Who
Killed Marcel Duchamp?”  Like a Man Ray show
each cloud, individual, hangs just right –
we can tell where they’ve been by where they go –
a limited printing of cloud, sky, night.
And it would not surprise me if the clouds
gave way, or pulled along that massive pair
of lips – matching halves of the self revealed
in isolation, and admired by crowds
of fawning critics who at long last care
that all the rules of art have been repealed.

 

Jamie Brown holds an MFA from American University (1988), where he studied with Frank Conroy, Henry Taylor, Myra Sklarew, Linda Pastan, James Alan McPherson, and Terry McMillan. He is Founder, Publisher and Editor of The Broadkill Review, Founder of the John Milton Memorial Celebration of Poets and Poetry, Publisher of the Broadkill River Press, and Director of the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. He taught at Wesley College in Dover, DE, The George Washington University in Washington, DC, and the first Creative Writing class ever offered at the Smithsonian Institution. He was the Fiction Editor of The Washington Review of the Arts, Contributing Editor for The Sulphur River Literary Review, Poetry Critic for The Washington Times, and was a member of the Poetry Committee of the Folger Shakespeare Library. His fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been widely published (including in translation in Hungary), and five of his plays have been produced in the DC Area, one of which swept the four major awards in the 2007 One-Act Play Competition in Milton, DE. He is the author of three books of poems, the chapbooks Sakura: A Cycle of Haiku (Broadkill River Press, 2013) and Freeholder and Other Poems (Argonne House Press, 1999), and a full-length collection, Conventional Heresies (Bay Oak Publishers, 2008). He is also author of the nonfiction collection Constructing Fiction (Broadkill Press, 2011). To read more by this author: Mapping the City Issue