Ha! So you are, after all.
Just found out about that grandpa
in Paxos, did you? I knew it,
called you Greek so many times
when your black ringlets
and olive face hovered over mine.
Although, okay, I admit
I also called you—depending on
the candle-, summer-sunset-, or winter-snowfall-
light through the windows—Mona Lisa,
superimposed upon a sepia Tuscan landscape,
or a Gauguin, especially when nude, lying
on your brown belly, almost a bloom
of orange (your favorite color)
frangipani behind your ear,
flowered sarong cast aside and lying
on a bamboo floor.

Me? I’m still Welsh-
white, a poor man’s Burton
or Hopkins who only gets you
in screenplays: Bathsheba bathing
on the roof, an aged Menelaus
before Paris comes along,
Mr. Christian after he steals
the Bounty.

But two years, and all have tried
to part us, foes, friends, the
circumstance: they thought
mere age and its differences
of time would matter,
but we’ve shattered all their creaking
wisdoms.

O, Salome! Dance
for me the seven veils again,
and I will give you any head
you want.

O, Love! How could they
have so badly underestimated
all your predestination.

O, clear-eyed Eros! And not your little
blind-folded Roman archer friend.
It’s how you know
that all is right and true:
when it’s not a choice you’ve made,
but a choice that has made you.

William Greenway’s seventh full-length collection, Everywhere at Once, winner of the 2009 Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, is from the University of Akron Press Poetry Series, which also published his seventh collection, Ascending Order (2003), winner of the 2004 Ohioana Poetry Book of the Year Award, and I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio (2002), which he co-edited with Elton Glaser. He has published over six hundred poems in periodicals, including Poetry, American Poetry Review, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. He has won the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Poetry Award, the Larry Levis Editors’ Prize from Missouri Review, the Open Voice Poetry Award from The Writer’s Voice, the State Street Press Chapbook Competition, an Ohio Arts Council Grant, and was 1994 Georgia Author of the Year. He’s Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he has been awarded a Distinguished Professorship in Teaching and three in Scholarship.

Will Kesling is the founder of Kesling Design and the Co-founder of Dreamkumo. He is also the Membership Director and Experience Development Director of AIGA Cleveland. He loves all things creative and is constantly impressed with the quality and talent here in Cleveland. When he is not working on client projects he is painting. “For me, painting is the one time when I can be completely free. No deadlines, no boundaries, just paint, canvas, coffee and some good tunes .” The idea behind this piece was that sometimes love can come in to our lives for just a short time. In that short time it heals you, stops the bleeding and then it’s gone, just like Platelets. Watercolor and Ink on canvas.