Colored Eggs
Gabriel Welsch The man who invented the Swingline collected Faberge eggs, a staple of the tsars at the turn of the last century that began and ended with warfare, which is not a distinguishing mark of any century. I used to think Swingline referred to the Rockettes’ disciplined cosine wave of calves and heels, a roil like the continental cracks or the trajectories of bombs that fissure and shuffle the ground, scattering roofs like papers fanned in a geometry of disarray, a tumult of lines like those etching lightly the brow of a girl that day at the library, telling how her flatmate’s mother disparaged how she dipped eggs in dye as opposed to painting them with Q-tips, using wax to set patterns to then fill with prismatic dash, dyes and paints to texture ornately the fragile surface. The jewels of a kitchen table empire, gifts crafted in a tidy room, one home at a time, they stitched stories together on the barest of essentials, like clasping your life and fixing a single crimp of steel to its corner, holding back decay, statistics, the equations of the inevitable, the certainty that the earth will move wherever you may stand. |
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About the Author:
Gabriel Welsch is the author of four collection of poems, the most recent being The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. His work has appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and recently in journals including Mid-American Review, Prime Number Magazine, Chautauqua, Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Main Street Rag, Ascent, Tahoma Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center.
Gabriel Welsch is the author of four collection of poems, the most recent being The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse. His work has appeared in Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, and recently in journals including Mid-American Review, Prime Number Magazine, Chautauqua, Adroit Journal, Gulf Coast, Main Street Rag, Ascent, Tahoma Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of advancement and marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center.
