MiPOesias

Website: www.redroom.com/author/scot-siegel

Accolades:

• Finalist Aesthetica Magazine Creative Works Contest
• Semi-finalist Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize
• Best of the Net nominee
• Pushcart Prize nominee
• Oregon State Poetry Association, First Prize

Publications:

• Thousands Flee California Wildflowers, Salmon Poetry, 2012 (forthcoming)
• Some Weather, Plain View Press, 2008
• Skeleton Says, Finishing Line Press, 2010
• Untitled Country, Pudding House Publications, 2009
• Recent work in MiPOesias, Front Porch, High Desert Journal, San Pedro River Review

Discovery Moment:

As a teen my only goal in life was to compete in the winter Olympics. I wanted to be a downhill racer. I wanted that even more than the girl. Franz Klammer’s fabled run, when he skied “right on the brink of disaster” to take gold at Innsbruck in 1976, hooked me.

I devoted most of my childhood to racing. When I was fifteen, my parents sent me to a ski academy, a boarding school near Lake Tahoe, so I could pursue the dream. I specialized in downhill. I loved the straight-aways; holding a bullet tuck at 80 miles per hour, the wind whistling through my helmet, the sensation of the terrain rising and dipping and dropping away beneath my feet, the silence of human powered flight…

By age nineteen, I had traveled across the country chasing FIS points, and I had trained side-by-side with some of the best in the world on the glaciers in Austria. At one point I was ranked 15th in the U.S. for my age, but I was still far from making the national team. I had defeated others who would later be selected, but I crashed often and never seemed to make it beyond regionals. At age 20, I finally called it quits and went to college.

While the Olympic dream did not materialize for me, the high-speed crashes and “right on the edge” recoveries have served me well through my life. I have learned what it means to live in the moment, and I suppose that extends to my writing.

*

The question of immortality is of its nature not a scholarly question. It is a question welling up from the interior, which the subject must put to itself as it becomes conscious of itself.

—Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific, Postscript

 

 

Poems:

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

It’s all gray at the bridge toll backup. It’s winter
It’s always winter here, and raining hard,
when it’s your turn to drive

Your new rideshare companion curls up like a cat
in the heated leather seat beside you. Asian,
though French you guess from her purr

She’s twenty, maybe twenty-four. You found her
on Craigslist. You know nothing about her
and of course she knows nothing of you

She’s comfortable enough in your escort––She’s
slowly nodding off—but when you reach down
for the stick, she grips the leather strap of her

black workbag a little harder, as if rendered
by an early morning dream that has returned
and taken hold

You turn up the heat and she breathes uneasily,
shifts in her seat. Though when her flushed
cheek turns, she smiles like daybreak, breath

tinctured with sage, raspberry, warm Belgian
chocolate—It doesn’t matter that you could be her
father, or her mother. It doesn’t matter if you are a

woman, or a man. The distance between you is con-
founding—You don’t know if you can trust yourself
with the truth.

*
Drawbridge
– after Drawbridge, California

Barn’s burnt down—
now
I can see the moon.
– Mizuta Masahide

What I believe is, when we leave this world we become UFOs,
and when we collide in that state inexplicable things happen on earth

Once when I was eight, my mother and father saw an alien
ship hovering over Los Altos. It was late. An odd pall

permeated the guts of our trailer. My father shook me awake
and pulled me into the overhead sleeper where my mother

lived most of that year. She half-knelt on her scabbed elbows
and pointed toward an odd bulge in the altostratus

where a second moon, then a third, pulsed and converged
as the real moon, a stepchild now, hunkered in a notch to east.

The crescent had turned away from the stars as an animal does
before it dies, and it moaned into a purple vase––

I remember being hungry that year. We burned slash and
poached deer and siphoned gasoline to survive. But we were

royalty that night when aliens, like moths, were drawn to our trailer…
Then as quickly as they appeared the lights stuttered and slid

across the frets of the bay’s rim like a giant roulette wheel
off-kilter, or a military jet maneuver… They disappeared

through a pinhole in the night.