- Not Food or Love
The time of spiders arrived: that seemed pure play of light, ideas borne on light.
Light said, Now watch this:
Murray said, “It has a / life. Body. We can take
The hot dog vendor closed down his stand learned how to process
—death in the air,” he said gently / death but haven’t known how to make the material surface.
. . . others. I sat darting alertness
convinced / she was saying something of stable meaning
minutes passed familiar and elusive at the same time [End Page 230]
Sleep might have been a structure to protect the eyes
only repeating / some TV voice. body a dreaming mound
minutes later that I was surrounded by noise / and commotion instructing us through a bullhorn. In that silence I . . .
horns, the / first of what would become . . .
To reverse, to reverse, the girl to pedal backwards /
through tracers and smoky arcs. The bands of color : life
Night brings crowds pushing up the incline, bending low to push against the incline
over. Got out of the car. See, overpass all the time
now and then a car actually crosses the overpass
snows the air turned clear and still [End Page 231]
already back inside, looking through glass.
still today.
bills, forms and coupons were scattered across the table. “Want dinner so early?” she said in a sexy whisper. “Sure to keep it in the back of our minds.” [End Page 232]
Patricia Carlin is the author of the poetry collection Quantum Jitters, forthcoming in 2009 (Marsh Hawk Press). Previous books include another the poetry collection, Original Green (2003), as well as Shakespeare’s Mortal Men, a critical study of selected plays. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, American Letters & Commentary, Verse, Boulevard, Pleiades, and BOMB. She co-edits the poetry journal Barrow Street, and she is an Associate Professor at New School University, where she teaches literature and poetry writing in the Writing Program.