Arsenic Lobster poetry journal Issue Six 2004 |
You have come to see loss as the future tense of love Nancy A Henry If she writes this poem something might happen that she can’t control. It’s a poem about catching hell, catching fire, catching craziness from the woman down the hall who chants the name of every stair. Here she is swollen with his love like a fat pink rose; here she is in his bed with a chewed pencil getting ready to write this poem. It’s a poem about notes she picks off greasy asphalt and undoes on the corkboard in her room; about those receipts for desperate things: silk roses, vodka, pregnancy test kits. It’s a poem about getting too creative at the makeup counter, getting up to no good and staying there awhile. She might get arrested if she writes this poem, might lose her reputation, her eternal salvation, what’s left of her feverish mind. She might lose him if she writes this poem… Reason enough to lay that first word down. |
About Nancy A Henry |