"Without Sunglasses" by Stuart Dischell

[audio mp3="http://barnstormjournal.org/content/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/without-sunglasses-dischell.mp3"][/audio]An invisible dogMakes me a blind manThis morning being pulledDown the avenue where the sunFills my eyes with gold.Where am I going, Big Fella,Without my sunglasses on a dayI really need them? Too early,Too harsh, too sudden, too shinyThe pavements of my city,The walls of graffitiGaudy as Byzantium.I wait for the light to change.No one at the intersection.Stuart Dischell is the author of four books of poetry; Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection, (Viking, 1993), Evenings & Avenues (Penguin, 1996), Dig Safe (Penguin, 2003), and Backwards Days (Penguin, 2007), and two chapbooks; Animate Earth (Jeanne Duval Editions, 1988), and Touch Monkey (Forklift, Ink, 2012). He has also received honors from the Pushcart Prize, the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and has been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Agni, Ploughshares, Slate, and The Kenyon Review, among others. His anthologized work includes Essential Pleasures, Hammer and Blaze, and Good Poems. He is currently a professor of Creative Writing for the MFA program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, as well as a contributing editor for the Alaska Quarterly Review.