Skip to main content

Timbre

Mixed media by Erin Curier
In our house there are books on books on every table and bedside stand. Books about the Roman Republic, silhouette of a bronze wolf. Tablets of poems crafted in long pipes like periscopes that you tell me you don't follow. A copy of your own novel holds a permanent corner of the round table - city of Buffalo in the rain. Blue stick figure notes dissect a yellow pad placeholder. An entire lecture series beacons we sit up and take notice. Anxious underfed populations balance on the head of a pin, hitchhikers.

I eat fettucini with green clams while reading midday, flip through saucy paragraphs, thumbing paper like garlic skin that sticks to skin. Lemon pepper punctuation. Monsters and friends spill from the orange cover and spine as I press down cautiously for fear of leaving clues on fresh snow and in the gutter of glue. Dedication like a large horse of a dog in woodblock poised in the foreground of a black forest.

Secondhand Baldwin catches fire again, and illogical cummings un-punctuates hearts cupping hearts. We are insatiable. An invisible woman written as a man writing as a wife. I savor the author's epigraph again, and the final page. I place the book back on the table. Trembling. Timbre. A play about an atheist. Great expectations. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shameless Early Promotion

My poetry book, The Fiction of Stillness, is available for pre-order now on Barnes and Noble. Official release date August 1st, 2024. Here's a taste: ... The table is smooth and round              symmetric         The chairs are haphazardly placed at the end of this day      I have breast cancer I say into the receiver   [communities must] pool resources   How to produce the sounds of the imaging                report into sentences that resonate with months of postponement weighty contrast on my right side   computing and comparing IM ratios for greater insight                          not sufficient to prove the efficacy of screening   ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vessel

Inside I imagine puckered cups of butter   cookies nested    in paper that  releases a sigh   But instead there may be fiction   within   wishes never reciprocated   Playbill of redundant arguments   One black glove    found fraying   This vessel on an emptied  table   solo     temptation is labeled with  another’s name   Guarded initials as if carved in melting snow     A tool unsuited  to the task of   prying open  Not yet valentine
8 comments
Read more

Open Mic, Cafe Babar

I remember arriving, not the prettiest but appealing  to certain bards in the back room, entering through  the Castro Valley corner door, walking the postage stamp sized  Cinzano bar curated by a man from Detroit who named  his establishment after a certain French elephant in a children’s book I arrive with budding consciousness around politically correct solidarity for disheveled neighbors, entering the cigarette lit night rising to tin siding ceiling to floor thumping insistence   Bruce and Joie and David and Laura and John, their ash and sweat accumulating as I waited patiently for my place on the crumpled sign-up sheet   Today, three decades later, I sit in a Santa Fe gallery named simply Here, and a poet reads to us of roadrunners and a bear and  a continuation of the call for preservation of our environment There is an otherworldly hum outside the window of leaded glass The owner sidles up behind me and pushes the fr...
Post a Comment
Read more