Lee Passarella
Requiescat
This wallpaper is killing me; one of us has got to go.
— last words of Oscar Wilde
A pale (though beefily substantial) ghost,
he haunted streets that’d feted him before.
He preyed on countrymen who’d heard the lore
about his fall. Yet none presumed to boast
superiority — played gentle host
instead, since the absinthe he favored more and more
was so well recompensed: the endless store
of epigrams and bon mots, all but lost
on poor old proper England now. Still, he
had little luck in Paris streets, as free,
almost, of love for him as London’s. So,
when money came — infrequently — he bought
love. Death was just an afterthought, a blow
as slight as his least sin. A minor blot.
Lee Passarella teaches English at Georgia Perimeter College and acts as senior literary editor for Atlanta Review magazine and as associate editor for the new literary journal FutureCycle. Passarella’s poetry has appeared in Chelsea, Cream City Review, Pudding, Louisville Review, The Formalist, Antietam Review, Gaia, Journal of the American Medical Association, The Literary Review, Edge City Review, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Snake Nation Review, Slant, Cortland Review, and many other periodicals and ezines. Swallowed up in Victory, his long narrative poem based on the American Civil War, was published by White Mane Books in 2002. It has been praised by poet Andrew Hudgins as a work that is `compelling and engrossing as a novel.| Passarella’s poetry collection The Geometry of Loneliness (David Robert Books) appeared in 2006. His poetry chapbook Sight-Reading Schumann will be published by Pudding House Publications later this year.
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