Archive - March 6, 2013

This is the title poem of a new collection of poems — Thai Comic Books: Poems from my life in Thailand with the Peace Corps: 1967-1969 by Burgess Needle, published by Big Table Publishing. His first collection, Every Crow in the Blue Sky, was published by Diminuendo Press in 2009. He is currently editing a journal he kept while teaching in Thailand. Thai Comic Books by Burgess Needle (Thailand 1967–69) It wasn’t a school day, but these children looked as if they’d never been in school regardless of the time They were far more intimate with the water buffalo under the bridge than with texts or blackboards While all around spring rice planting went on forever and ever as it had all their brief lives and the only excitement occurred when the foreigner arrived, sat on a bench right on their own bridge and opened pages and pages of pictures . . .