Beau Boudreaux is the author of Significant Other, which won the New Dawn Unlimited chapbook award.  Forthcoming his first collection of poetry Running Red, Running Redder will be published by Cherry Grove Collections in the spring of 2012.  

Beau received a Ph.D. degree in English from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2002, his M.A. from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi in 1996, and his B.A. in English from the University of Southern California.  

Beau has published poetry widely in journals including Antioch Review, Cream City Review, and Louisiana Literature, also appearing in The Southern Poetry Anthology.  He teaches English in Continuing Studies at Tulane University. 

 He lives in New Orleans.

Asleep in a mangrove I dream
I built the town out of spit
and newspaper, struck a match to its
outskirts, and let the flames dance in.
The mirror in the park now a black lake
and in it my face looking out, past
the brick red swans deep in smoke, past
the singed grass. A slow wind stirs
bright ashes. It takes the heat into itself,
changes it—the moths, the amber throated
hummingbird, the dandelion seeds, all blaze
with a scorched sheen. What fire’s
done to me I’d have done to myself:
everything kindled, the luminous grows--
even the coral and the anemone sparks,
blooming beneath the black drum of earth.