Never Trump.
Let's get ready for the #AWP19 Conference!
The Mercy of Traffic by Wendy Taylor Carlisle:
Now available for pre-order!
My intention is to be open, willing, and ready to any opportunity that might reveal itself as fruitful - to be in the right place at the right time, and, with the help of the universe, have all the pieces within my frame align with balance, order, and meaning.
After the mob murdered the man for eating
a cow, it was found to be meat
from a goat. Why can I not
stop thinking about it—
the stringy flesh inside his gut,
he is stripped down to the essentials:
a man and his facts, a meteor
shattering into little stars
Jealousy is the anticipation of loss, real or imagined, to a rival. Envy is prompted by covetousness and a wicked desire to supplant someone else. But it seems to me that jealousy is a euphemism for envy—one of the seven deadly sins, the hatred that prompts Nemeses to lead Narcissus to the pool. We call envy jealousy to hide its danger—Echo and her laughter.
I did not love you, not
in the way we are taught to think
of love, but
you held me, listened to me, made me
say what I needed.
So, now we must negotiate all the
god-forsaken years spent indentured
to one god or another millennia
after millennia like strata embedded
into our primordial DNA.
I never perfected the art of taking
of claiming the merely found as mine
never felt the extensive satisfaction
of keeping all my finds
Vehement shakes and frowns,
points to his pad and pencil.
“Too sad” he writes . . . (to remember,
to be no longer able to play)
I remember Rene Otto Castillo. Because the lines and their sizes
are all there though we have made several attempts to erase
with all our might. A smell from the pot on a hearth is out there
from the window and everybody in the street breathes the beetroot
soup. It is launch. It is ethereal nose everybody wears all this noontide.
If only one could play them without the “tits and feathers.”
A profound unmitigated loneliness is the only truth of life.
A fairy godmother gives you wishes, you ask for a dress. A fish prince gives you wishes, you ask for a sausage. When someone offers us infinity we can’t imagine what we’d do with it. All we would ask – a walk in the dark.
The other day a woman was pulled from the canal unconscious and not breathing. That’s when I realized I should have done something sooner – hanged myself from a ceiling hook or bitten down on the muzzle of a gun.
The children stay home from school
often now. Homework never complete.
They have grown silent. Whenever they
talk, it is said, they only speak about
colors missing from the rainbow.
