The Suicide
Rent from DeepDyve- The Suicide
An intentional girl tumbling into a precipice. Below, the freeway, oblivious. Gills and wings and limbs, and the ability to sing and swim and fly at the same time. To be alive, and to choose to die. So much splicing and collage. Gene by gene. Creature by creature. The vestigial gills. The rudimentary feathers. The billions of years it took to make her. So much for chaos, novelty, pleasing anarchies. The wagon wheel rolling away from the wagon, but also the rapt, orbiting attention of satellites. Horse-drawn carriages. Rock and roll. Henry Ford with his eyes open in a field of clover. Internal combustion. The assembly line. No more after, no more before, just the traffic (all along, all along, all along) and the sweet rolling on and on of its accidental song.
Laura Kasischke has published six collections of poetry (most recently Gardening in the Dark, Ausable Press, 2004) and four novels (most recently Be Mine, Harcourt, 2007). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
