Arsenic Lobster poetry journal |
Issue Thirty-one Spring 2013 |
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Semitone Étude (pianissimo), in which you skip alternating notes Christopher Robley Katherine misses her son strangely now—in landscapes. Where a red pail in a sandbox needs no asterisk or explanation. Half full, its ordinary stillness serves. Bare-stem buckwheat scratches summer’s naked edge. Shadows of another season angle on the yard until it yields. This afternoon moves darkness like a lullaby. Tomorrow, she’ll spend the day omitting him; what gives hope hurts. Sadness needs no signifier here. Every stroke is a resistance: his shape, his shade— She could shut both eyes tight as a tomb and render him from memory, call him from that darkness when he doesn’t call for her. But a playful wind is whipping up Mount Tabor and she wants to catch a dandelion’s ghost seed in mid-air: I remember everything. I promise, I remember. She seeks him now in elision. When time blinks open: a deeper red, a rougher sand, a stillness made more still by the blur of windborne seeds—deaf to color—flurrying like a first snow, settling on cars parked along the street like punctuation. |
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