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
There is now a wooden seat, where the poet pissed, for the repose of those who wish to enjoy the view—donated, unknowingly, by local dignitaries.
She stands beside the ashes of the woman she was only minutes ago. She bows slightly and thanks everyone for their time.
In this case, it was not the clothes that were made to fit her body but rather her body had to be trimmed and in some cases, cut off to make sure the clothing fit.
Take the bully’s words, the bruises, the broken hearts, the lost fortunes, the lost babies, the grandmothers’ last breaths, the guilt and shame of being touched in the wrong places, the burned houses, the ripped dresses, take it all and set it to the sewer to be treated, to be purified and set free.
who knows maybe we’re all going to make it & pull through & get beyond it all but certainly not without the help of someone else who really & truly gives a shit
Of course it was a little odd to be glad of the bombs that had blown the buildings to bits, to be grateful for the failed bankrupt state that had enabled the holes to remain holes, so lying on the grass of an accidental playground, one just listened to the ping-pong ball batted back and forth across the concrete table.
Petr Borkovec is now a somewhat neglected author, and it is unquestionably true that only a small handful of readers know his work.
They are together, finally, in each other's arms, new lovers joined by the need to be consoled, the need to console.
Outside the classroom, it is winter. /
The trees are spoken in a leaner language, /
and the light is too brittle to resemble /
a green river, a passing train, a boy.
A world much like our own, mistempered & twi-natured, three-fold purgatorial zone /
where Lord Hearsay sits with all his might upon the tallest, narrowest chair, the barstool throne
