North Dakota Quarterly is proudly edited at the University of North Dakota, and life at NDQ world headquarters is shaped by the rhythm of campus life. We not only enjoy the assistance of UND students, but our editors are faculty either at UND or elsewhere.
As a result, Lori D’Angelo’s two poems in NDQ 90.3/4 resonated with us in different (and amusing) ways. As the latest issue of NDQ is winging its way to your mail boxes and for those of you who teach, the winter/spring semester is starting, please take a moment and enjoy “How to Survive the Apocalypse” and “Back to School”
How to Survive the Apocalypse
Go to the forest.
Drive past the Danger sign.
When you get to the cliff,
jump.
When you come to a rainbow,
grab it.
Aim for the color blue.
Cling to it.
Close your eyes.
The smoke will clear up,
eventually.
Back to School
There are no poets here.
Or there are more than we can count.
We can’t count. We are poets.
We are bottled water, Diet Mountain
Dew loving, T-shirt wearing
recapturing our youth, we never lost it, but it
eluded us. We can take your blood,
if you can give it to us. We have drunk
our own blood and drowned in it,
and then we sunk/swim passed our swimming test
because everybody passes. Everybody fails.
Rite of passage, sharpen your nails.
Fingers on the dry erase board
just don’t have that same green-faced
Wicked Witch of the West quality
as the you-can-wash-the-chalkboards punishment,
of our youth, the first time, dry lipped, that
band room kiss that didn’t happen when
someone walked in. Later, someone said,
you would never cheat, and you tried to be
like that, that good. You’d like to think
you’ll make it this second time around.
~
Lori D’Angelo is a grant recipient from the Elizabeth George Foundation and an alumna of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Recent work has appeared in Beaver Magazine, Bullshit Lit, Idle Ink, One Art Poetry Journal, and Wrong Turn Lit. Find her on X @sclly21 or Instagram at lori.dangelo1.
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