« Corey Mesler » I HAVE SOME BEAUTIFUL REJECTIONS I have some beautiful rejections. Things that make your heart hurt. There are words and they are used well, lining me up, pinning me in place. I stay up late into the pasty night, studying these rejections, gleaning from them reasons to keep going, to keep burning the template again, with angry words, that suffer, that pummel, that sing. Words hungry, hell yes, for rejection. A LITTLE AUTOBIOGRAPHY, 2005 VERSION I smoked a lot of dope. I said Fuck You to the dominant paradigm. I was young, we were all anarchists, as we stole our Playboys, and shot our guns. We were just kids in suburbia, bored, free, angry. Why were we so angry? I wouldn’t trade those days for comfort or schooling, coming as they did, right when I needed them. In the confusing years before money and children and dreams of an oil-free economy. Now the drugs I take are prescribed and I sneak them so the kids don’t see. Still, I say, you know, Fuck You to the Administration, bent as they are, the bastards, on raping my heady, toothsome, made-up world. Corey Mesler has published prose and/or poetry in Turnrow, Paumanok Review, Yankee Pot Roast, Monday Night, Elimae, The American Drivel Review, Poet Lore, Forklift OH, Euphony, Rattle, Dicey Brown, Cordite, Cellar Door, Heat City Literary Review, In Posse Review, Cranky, Three Candles, StorySouth, Canopic Jar, Juked, Pindeldyboz, Mitochondria, Mars Hill Review, 13th Warrior Review, Monkeybicycle, Arkansas Review, Stirring, Red River Review, Center, Small Press Review, Jabberwock Review, Orchid, Quick Fiction, Timber Creek Review, Hobart, Poetry Motel, Bullfight, Potomac Review, Big Muddy, Slant, Texas Poetry Review, Rockhurst Review, Wavelength, Lilliput Review, Pearl, Ducts, Sunny Outside, Fish Drum, Into the Teeth of the Wind, Mid-American Poetry Review, Dust, Cotyledon, Buckle &, Iodine, Snakeskin (England), The Melic Review, Spillway, Thema, Kumquat Meringue, Lonzie’s Fried Chicken, Electric Acorn (Dublin), Gin Bender, Blue Unicorn, Black Dirt, The Spirit that Moves Us, Wind, Red Rock Review, BlazeVox, Concrete Wolf, Memphis Magazine, Rhino, Visions International, others. He has work in the anthologies Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (Breakaway Books), Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Press) and others. Corey has been nominated many times for the Pushcart Prize. He has a chapbook of poems, "Piecework", from the Wing and a Wheel Press. Corey won the Moonfire Poetry Chapbook Competition 2003 and his chapbook, "Chin-Chin in Eden", was published by Still Waters Press. Another chapbook, "Dark on Purpose", appeared from Little Poem Press in 2004. And another, "Short Story and Other Short Stories", is due from Parallel Press in 2006. One of Corey's short stories was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, edited by Shannon Ravenel. His novel-in-dialogue, "Talk", was published by Livingston Press in 2002. Raves from Lee Smith, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Stern, Debra Spark, Suzanne Kingsbury, Frederick Barthelme and John Grisham. His forthcoming novel, "We are Billion-Year-Old Carbon", is also from Livingston Press. Corey has been a book reviewer (for The Commercial Appeal, BookPage, The Memphis Flyer), fiction editor, university press sales rep, grant committee judge, father and son. With his wife, he owns Burke’s Book Store, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.