Jeff Weddle grew up Prestonsburg, a small town in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. He has lived, worked, and/or studied in New Hampshire, Maine, Tennessee, Mississippi and, for almost twenty years, Alabama, where he teaches in the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama. Over the years he has been a newspaper reporter, a radio disc jockey, a fry cook, a Tae Kwon Do teacher, an English teacher, a public library director, and a barfly, among other things. He is the author of sixteen books, most of which are available through Amazon and other online retailers, but the two publications of which he is most proud would be difficult for most people to acquire. The first of these is a poem which a friend had tattooed on her arm without first mentioning it, and that one is hard to beat. The second is his selected poems, VRITMË NËSE KE KOQE, translated into Albanian by the esteemed Fadil Bajraj and published in Kosovo by SabaiumBB. As with the tattoo, one would have difficulty trying to find this book in an online bookstore. Not that anyone asked, but Jeff strongly advocates “The Six Golden Rules of Writing,” proposed by novelist Ernest J. Gaines, for anyone seeking to improve their work. These are: “Read, read, read and write, write, write.” He believes anything beyond these rules, other than lived experience, just gets in the way. Jeff’s writing has been influenced by many of the old dogs, though Barry Hannah, Richard Brautigan, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Kenneth Patchen, Etgar Keret, Lyn Lifshin and Charles Bukowski lead the pack.
Ménage a Trois
Bear with me, please. After all, this is only a movie.
The story is lewd, but that is so often the case.
Boy meets girl. Girl meets girl.
All the drinking and sweat.
Pictures torn from old magazines.
The girl — the first one — has a limp from an undefined mishap.
Poor thing. Plus, she is plain.
The second girl never shows.
The boy is torn between his mother and the limp.
He yearns for the second girl,
but that’s wasted angst.
Bear with me.
The second girl lives a thousand years ago.
So, no wonder.
She is beautiful but feels incomplete.
The boy wishes on a star.
The girl with the limp contemplates the moon and time.
A thousand years before, the second girl dreams of ecstasy.
The girl with the limp thinks of this
as the boy slips his hand between her legs.
The boy thinks of this as the girl with the limp undoes his pants.
That’s when the mother walks into the room.
That’s when the girl wakes up a thousand years ago.
Everyone is drenched but far from satisfied.
The mother, embarrassed, wanders off to drink.
Roll credits.
Time is a Form of Gravity
Old men with theatrical grudges,
old wrongs, imagined clues,
lost photographs.
There were misplaced apologies
that might have helped.
Old fires with their killing smoke.
The failure of the dance, even that.
Good days sinning with young maidens
and clumsy exits, prideful.
The room where they met.
The years.
Now, brittle bones
and minds fallen into caves.
Carnivorous fears,
the loss of what was only wished for.
Hands held and dropped,
the selfish theatre of desire
with act five in disarray.
Nothing left but the curtain.
No roses, no bows.
The audience long since lost.
Quantum Entanglement, Maybe
On June 12 1954, a woman of clear spirit
saw your face, just as it is now,
right this moment.
She was eating a ham and Swiss sandwich
on sourdough bread, plenty of mayonnaise,
and drinking a glass of sweet tea
with lemon.
She always had lemon with her tea
to cut through the sugar,
though she required both flavors
for optimum enjoyment.
Your face flashed into her mind
with your eyes looking directly into hers.
It was quite an intense experience
for anyone on June 12 1954,
let alone a woman of clear spirit.
In truth, she almost stopped
eating her sandwich
but it was her only chance for lunch
before heading back to her job
at the bank and she was still hungry.
Five minutes later she had forgotten
your face. She glanced in her mirror
and straitened her blouse.
Back to the salt mines.
Lovers in Love
It is love, of course.
It is impossible.
He is he, after all.
She is she.
It is love that plunges the knife.
They would be together
if everyone knew everything,
but no one knows much
and most know nothing.
But it is love.
The mind staggers.
It is the sort of love
that destroys sleep
but feeds dreams.
That sort of thing.
Impossible.
You will see them here
each day
if you watch.
There will be a tip of the hat.
A nod.
My Bag of Sorrows
Also, I must tell you
that I am unhappy
with several things.
I do not like
the disappearance of cats
from the world,
an event you might protest
has not happened,
but I assure you
that you have only not noticed.
I detest that I can look
in a person’s eyes
and know the time and manner
of their death.
I’ve won more than my share of bar bets
with this trick,
but haven’t felt especially
good about it, even so.
I weep that my dreams come true
in only sad and trivial ways.
Like my recurring dream
of loud customers
in checkout lines
who are always
twelve cents short of their bill.
It is a mystery where the cats have gone.
It is also a mystery when I will die
and in what manner.
No one sees me the way I see the world.
Now let me look at you,
if you still wish it.
I will tell you many things
about fate and forever.
It will be a story of beautiful regret,
but you will never know
if I am lying.
