CACHE LA POUDRE
Tonight the cicadas are deafening.
Nothing to do but lean into despair
the way one leans into a mirror.
All summer you’ve been dying
in the shopping cart of my mind.
I fill it up with bottles of vinegar.
The river is lonely. It has no home.
Soon your voice will be everywhere.
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ELIZABETH KNAPP is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from Literal Latté and Iron Horse Literary Review, she has published poems in Best New Poets, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and many other journals. She teaches at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.
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Read more by Elizabeth Knapp:
Author’s Website
Poem in New Orleans Review
Poem at Literal Latté
Poem in Spoon River Poetry Review
Three poems in The Adirondack Review
The man keeps telling me I’m beautiful. /
I still look young. //
He says it like I’ve asked for it, /
but I don’t care. //
For him or beauty.
Vagina neck. Twat gullet. /
Neck with brain wrinkles /
that yank me...
One had a ketchup bottle, the other a bottle of mustard, and they were holding them, crotch-level, squirting long streaks of ketchup and mustard on the floor, while we clapped in unison.
Who begat the earth? I did.
I grew it three times in my belly.
That isn’t true. It is.
Here is the image of a wife
in a thatched smokehouse––
she sleepwalks from fire
to fire, setting start again.
Afraid / to ask, I wonder if Joko was tested. / I don’t want to put him on the spot / and I know I’d think less of him / if he gave the wrong answer.
slut, thug, doper, bitch, her voice never rising above a whisper. These words may make you uncomfortable.
The woman carrying her life, /
who passed by a moment ago, calls out /
from the next street and someone answers, /
but not to her.
She’s never invited me to one of her parties. / Well, she invited me once. // Once I got there, she never talked to me. /
Never offered me a glass of wine. // Her brain must be a crowded / little place telling her, You’re terrific!
They had more interesting curses than ‘fuck’. /
They loved the views that they made for the future, /
for the people who were lucky enough /
to be born after them.
