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
For hours in a small windowless freezing room, I spliced digital video and created fine fades—just so. I did not save my projects in the media bin. I did not name or save a thing.
I was having an affair with my partner’s therapist, and she was having an affair with mine.
I am a panting dog of a parent, running /
to retrieve so many arms, legs, lips, /
breasts, million nipples.
We never went to the moon. Instead we grew roses and fed our neighbor pasta and fruit salad.
In our latest interview, we talk to David Biespiel about his latest volume of poetry, Republic Café, a long poem that explores the radical intimacy of public trauma and what it means to inhabit the reality of the body politic within one's own skin.
Some stories should be left alone because there is no way to defend them /
and no way not to see ourselves in the darkest versions of others.
it might be said that whoever planted their heels /
against the uprooted soil and lit a match against /
a mute sky / disconnected night did not /
set fire to but merely blew a spark
A dog growled and barked. Good dog, / I heard, unsure if it was my voice / or my dog.
The dementia fractures her /
the same way ice splits a rock.
Pascal drops a quarter in the slot,
and the Gypsy Queen shuffles the deck.
