"California," "Hermeneutics," and "Russian Lit"
California
expresses you into the trees
as if Route 5/101 had spit you
from the failed gods of San Ysidro
where a woman shoulders a child
from the blondness of LA
which does violence to icons
from a kingdom of gangs and tarps—
from the Grape Street Crips and the homeless—
and you find yourself , the trip opening
in a green shelter hurtling north
with the numb openness of your face
forgetting the pissed-in stalls of Del Mar at dusk
and your scars have vanished
and you can’t follow tonight, beneath the moths
Hermeneutics
after Paul Ricoeur
I read for the notions, I say. To know the writer’s life
is what I really fancy. Why else should I trace each
evolution of tense, each subtlety of phrase?
Bambi stands poised on the page, elegant,
beautiful, but I am skeptical of deer. Deer can kill
with their antlers—from the Old French antoillier,
a horn in front of the eyes. Is this deer some rogue unicorn?
Is the horn a stabbing horn? Plus, deer have cloven, dangerous
front hooves, sharp for defense, that also form
upside-down heart-shaped tracks. That tiny, remorseless
hoof forms the sign of love in the mud. Is its purpose
to coerce a reader to drop her guard? The writer leaves home:
A divorce? A subpoena? Another forest? Words
are a gossamer negligee, concealing the ugly bits
with chiffon, with lace, with blood-colored spandex.
Russian Lit
There was something
about his voice
when he lectured,
something about
his Russian books—
their suicide
protagonists,
their wrestle with
god. When he read
Tolstoy aloud,
I imagined
Count Vronsky, but
I never thought
of the train. There
was something a-
bout his Slavic
good looks, about
stiletto cheek-
bones and glossy
skin that made me
sweeten and rise
beyond the edge
of my little
life. After each
night’s class, I wished,
and shivered in
my marriage bed.
My body wept.
![Wendy Taylor Carlisle Wendy Taylor Carlisle](https://www.unlikelystories.org/sites/default/files/wendy_photo_greg_comnes.jpg)
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic and this spring, Doubleback Books reprinted her 2008 book, Discount Fireworks, available free at: Doubleback Books. Her website is www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com. Photo by Greg Comnes.