Forest Neurotica
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Forest Neurotica*
Slow drag—
forest——otica
A camera embedded in the eye of a butterfly’s hind wing captures gilded swans choking on cream. I can’t see the trees for the ugly irises. Like a honey thief flying at ground level, I gorge on the secret source of a runaway brook I have tied to a string. Night in nothing but a sheer blue blindfold idles down the hoof track. Those bitch reins. I’m a floating dock on a shame lake. Me and the Highway Man, two insomniacs under our Victrola tent. The sky, a lap dance of stars. The constellations: a gown for a green wife on all fours. A hangbird on a branch sips from the acorn’s bitter cup and trills: love-laughs-at-locksmiths love-laughs-at-locksmiths
Catherine Bowman, a native of El Paso, Texas, is Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University in Bloomington. Her collections of poems are The Plath Cabinet, Rock Farm, Notarikon, and 1–800-HOT-RIBS, which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize and the Kate Frost Tufts Prize.
Footnotes
* “Forest Neurotica” first appeared in Ploughshares 93, Vol. 30/1 (Spring 2004): 19. Reprinted by permission of the author, © 2008 Catherine Bowman. [End Page 69]
