Blue Positive

by Corey Mesler

About the Author: COREY MESLER has published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Good Poems American Places, and Esquire/Narrative. He has published 8 novels, 4 short story collections, numerous chapbooks, and 5 full-length poetry collections. His new novel, Memphis Movie, is from Counterpoint Press. He’s been nominated for many Pushcarts, and 2 of his poems were chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife he runs a bookstore in Memphis.

Excerpt

I have lived alone among bookshelves, an eidolon of a former man more vigorous, certainly more vigorous, and perhaps more intrepid about the bigger picture, the world at large, you might say. I have lived with the musty smell of pages on my fingers and the somewhat airy countenance of a dreamer, a man in cloudcuckooland, though, really, I am more grounded than most men, I boast. I think I can make that boast.

Every story like this story begins with a dame. This is my story that begins with a dame but I make no claims for its originality. Though I am a man composed of folios and phantasm, I often offer my services in a slightly more lucrative, more risqué, some might say a more serious occupation. I find lost people.

Usually the lost people don’t want to be found. In Memphis, where I ply my strange vocation, there are many places to hide, places as dark as a thief’s pocket, flash coves, buttocking shops and hot water doss houses. I am known in these places. I am respected in some, loathed in too many, welcome in few. Yet it is where I know to go. My name is Charlie Main.

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