FROM THINK TANK
The kettle boils, boils now.
Maligned and languishing in an upstairs room: a lacrimal dimple
trips the obscene.
Honk geese: soprano duck, duck
hobbles, belly first, a girl-falcon spins,
rebuffs the rough draft.
Too long, my husband’s sweater
sleeve. My patience no: threads of what
warms a baby's unrivalled calamitous
hour. Full sob
transpires to rust the pendulous rug,
long in the arms, short in time.
Without hours, how cheer? Old devotions
now point to
sorrow: cap’s cracked and leaking.
Door doesn’t open: exit through mirror.
Oh
the plumbing
fails.
*
Euphonic rubber spin,
whose driving you where? Wherefore
drink in the warm air pressed from
the dash dash dash of
my figurative folk-form. My hap-
hazard phrase is cued, lit, and moving
down the avenue, the avenue
8.
*
For not wanting to dose oneself in the mother
you will receive a forty-dollar fine.
Rising out of feet, and flowering, as a plumb tree flowers:
an aromatic man.
Emails from travelers, from soon-to-be friends, whose spelling is terrible
and what does that portend?
The matted hair of a doll: almost flowing, is.
Breathe in. And I am not going anywhere, studied by God.
Bleary from living under sun, my condition is excellent for pleasure.
The “brain people” say the murderer cannot be jailed
because he is only eleven. The “morality people” say he cannot be judged
because he is only eleven.
But the “law people” are going to take his life away. Bracken
in the mind suspended above the floor knows of wheat fields and
branches horizontally lusting. And an exquisite flower just today
opens. How best to
empty it?
Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, 100 Notes on Violence from Ahsahta Press and Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines, due out from Coffee House in September. She is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado at Boulder.