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
They built themselves /
and they built us /
and they built a time /
and an idea of time.
perjury of lightning bolts: /
a fish spine rises from the trenches of the wound-up day, /
disrupting darkness
At night I become his missing arm. /
The one he lost on the front, looked for /
years later and didn´t find.
Bless the silence. Bless the hiss. Bless the punch. /
Bless the kiss. Bless the lemon. Bless the lime. //
Bless the fishbone in the throat of time.
I went out to my mailbox. /
Everything was addressed to a previous occupant (twice removed) /
who is now, /
according to my neighbors, / deceased.
Love among unequals is not a math problem. /
Is more profane than sacred. It means /
a woman available, without joy.
As we arrived /
the red-haired children /
were it seemed everywhere staring at us /
from behind things or caught /
frozen in the open like frightened rabbits
one man dies to save the many /
to open possibilities the way /
the sun enters the court of the sky
Chinese ladybugs adapt quickly. They do not care about tradition. They undersell the French ladybugs and take over their turf. You’d think there would be enough for all, aphids being what they are, but no. Oh no.
I learn it means people prone to sadness / who develop depression, but it reminds me / of a favorite Chinese restaurant: Double / Happiness...
