Trains don’t collide but intersect
when / where she stopped leaving early
and I stopped not working.
Work? Left me without stories.
It’s not amnesia but condominium life,
lights fluorescing off stage,
desert sky with half the stars.
My God, it’s full of snow!
When one is 1 plus the product
of all lesser primes,
where to hide but the imaginary line?
– Kenton K. Yee
Author’s Note: Recently, I’ve been thinking about poetry in revision. One way this poem can be read is as an ars poetica. “Snow Condominium” views a poem as a condominium of snow that’s being reimagined and restructured. …
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The last time Christine-Ann Corbin wore a dress was two months ago when she turned twelve. Her parents had a small birthday party and celebrated with a few friends and neighbors. The conversation quickly turned to the unrest in Europe.
Little Falls, Vermont, was exactly as its name revealed in the early summer of 1914, a small town of a few thousand inhabitants dependent on the many waterfalls to drive old flour mills and Hadley’s Metal Fabrications, the biggest employer, where her father worked. Hadley’s built fenders for the automobile market, and earlier in the year won a contract to fabricate them for the Army.
On this particular day, Christine prepared herself for another “conversation” with her mother about her refusal to wear a dress, something her teachers were increasingly unsettled over.…
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sketch the ridge waiting
for sunset, light beaming
behind cumulonimbus,
……………but I can’t get the trees right.
wildfires glare from the west
shroud us in haze, but the blue shadow
of sierra still towers
…………………………when the sky blackens,
…………………………the stars pierce
…………………………& I still haven’t seen one fall
finish the sketch from a photograph,
the memory of actually being
just out of reach, perfect days
blur at the edges.
…………………………sketch in pen
…………………………it forces deliberation
……………where you hesitate, where you’re firm,
……………trace it all from the beginning,
…………………………………..enamored with the possibility
…………………………………..that ink will bleed
…………………………………..when coffee spills
……………………………..I carve
the layer of dirt on my skin
underglaze on clay,
…………………………trace a finger
…………………………a print on sunburn
…………………………the light lusters.…
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Efforts to locate next of kin had failed. Only the gravediggers and I stood in the ancient cemetery among the mounds of exhumed plots encircled by high-rise apartment buildings blocking the morning sun.
Otis murmured something about a skeleton crew. The others laughed and leaned on their shovels. I checked my watch—already a quarter after. The media would not be coming. I nodded to Otis. He climbed aboard the gravedigger, started its engine, and steered it over to the sunken rectangle. The claw descended and scooped up its first load of dirt.
Ten years ago, the Cremation Initiative had provoked fierce controversy. Exhumations were slow in the beginning until media attention declined, and the citizenry moved on to other concerns. A few grieving families made feeble protests, but disinterments proceeded at an ever-swifter pace, creating a boom for the cremation business, columbaria, and real estate companies, which scooped up the properties for development.…
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Act 1. You and me
Filets of trout perfectly browned in warm butter beside a quartered lemon slice on two Wedgewood plates. A carrot-sculpted rosette. Two glasses of rosé. Brown, yellow, blue, orange, red passion. “I’ll have iced tea; she’ll have water.” The server left us alone to hold hands in the flickering light of a candle, the shape of light caressing your face like breezes rustling a redbird’s feathers.
Act 2. Her
I just want someone. Why can’t I find someone? They come in here every week, sit at the same table, hold hands, never see me, see only each other, like I’m a distant noise, a car crash in some other neighborhood, a solar flare whose eruption won’t affect their climate-controlled environment, a damned iceberg calving, dissolving into the sea, disappearing into atoms small enough to be carried on the waves of their love sighs.…
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Most of the things my son did, spraying a can of deodorant down his throat, eating little orange berries off a tree in the park, berries his friends said were poison, wouldn’t work, but the noose he’d made by attaching his red and gold Gryffindor muffler to the light fixture on his bedroom ceiling could have done the job if the fixture had held his weight.
When, hearing the thump, I ran into his room, he said he didn’t know what happened. “But I’m not hurt,” he said. “Thankfully.”
Our daughter Carrie, his little sister, was at a friend’s birthday party. “Don’t tell her.”
She doesn’t need to know, I said, picking the pieces of broken glass from his bedroom floor. He wanted to clean it himself, but I wouldn’t let him, afraid he’d get hurt.…
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I look at this imaginary painting on the wall –
A man is standing on an Irish cliff with the morning dew glistening
Upon the grass as green as green can be
And in his unruly beard that is sometimes more brown than red,
Other times more red than brown.
The sun is in his eyes and he’s squinting.
In the distance where he is looking
There is a roiling sea with a small ship rocking on it.
Two women are on that ship, on their way to stand also on the Irish cliff
Where the dew will cling to their bare feet and hang from the hems of their long flimsy skirts.
One woman is with the man of the unruly beard where the red and the brown do battle.…
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