e m i l y c a r r

from Name Your Bird Without A Gun

—The Part Of The Brain We Share With TRex

eighteen

Crickets wind their one note to the breaking, a lone squirrel runs
guy wire, the subtle slinking cat stands inside the moon’s shadow,
which is one hundred miles wide & travels at two thousand mph.

Dusk falls: useful, ordinary. For one moment she can't find the
vanished evidence—.
In her ignorant body which is so glad to be alive…
Liberty sits by the window & counts thirty-four crows.

Opening a can of cat food, she imagines herself a bride in the
kitchen. The sketchier the better, like a simply drawn young
mother pouring milk from a pitcher.

She puts on a translucent white sundress & eats a communion
tablet. Let me! she says. Everyone else has died, why shouldnt I?
The drug enters the beautiful membranes of her eyes, lights up
one cell at a time until her brain is flooded with sound or silence.
There are she thinks some desperate oaks in here.

Belief, or dream: with its immediate branches.
In the air she thinks there are tennis balls & chemical experiments,
there is semen & spit, there is holy words & humidity, there is
false molecules of memory colliding with the past, there is
a marimba in the trees saying water, water.

There is what love is there is her bare feet saying it is over: flat
like a dream on both sides she is the heroine let her do it—.

Leopards Of White Dream

page of swords

You sit across from empty cathedrals. Spring snow falls shyly from
a light red sky. Gods hand huge on the green earth: seeing no
flesh. You are nowhere, exactly.

As a voice pulled at weak edges like the sea.
Elbows convinced of the consonants, hand believing the axe has
flowered… a leaf, & treeless. Freed of all prayer—.
(Or maybe you just want to know how. I dont know

(Not for Liberty.) (The beauty of that.)

Breaking up & falling out of love are the same thing only, of
course altogether different.

On the snow as it grows white God floats like dawn. Tongues of
blame fill the foreground. A window mutates into an axe & a
mechanical cow.

Women, suppliants, strangers, guests & other intruders.
It sounds like rain or a bat or the black planets: drowning.
Stand. Back to wait for the ricochet.
Do not ask how long you loved. Do not ask: if you were real.

What would God say. Name the parts. Define each name. (But if
Gods grace is simply random, well for one thing it makes a more
interesting news report. Gods choice can be seen as emerging
from the dark side of reason like a red Planet

Constitutional Bagatelle page of wands
	Through the dramatic climax of wet window the wind says hunh. The dogs of early evening squabble. The ragged pulse of church bells is pulled into sky. Liberty unbundles her ribs, sheds her bark & shines. Tender: cunningly. Make love. (Make me.) Brakelights flower, helicopters lament. Her thighs happen. Uninvited, they arrive. (In honor of a beauty that owes us nothing.) A lacy bra with violent flowers. The melody runs away with your wrists. A cathedral making tribute to that which does not exist. Or snowflakes falling inside the globe of Mozarts holy heaven. (Why did God make us love?) (Because God loves stories.) Peopling the sky with his fish. (Pull off your jeans & Tshirt with a fury like mountains, or cannonballs.) (If one loves, then immediately one also admires, fears, & defends.) (So much for love!) (At some point you will have to admit you have passed the point of no return, you are hurtling towards a future even Liberty cannot imagine & all around you, your intent runs backward, grace notes falling off to rendezvous with her faith or trust or is that word love
next
EMILY CARR has published two books of poetry: directions for flying (Furniture Press 2010) & 13 Ways of Happily: Books 1 & 2 (Parlor Press 2011), which was chosen by Cole Swensen as the winner of the 2009 New Measures Prize. Excerpts from The Weights of Heaven, Emily's autobiography-in-progress, was published in the Adaptations Issue of The Western Humanities Review. For a video performance of other excerpts from Emily's tarot novel, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, visit www.ifshedrawsadoor.com. Other excerpts have also been published on Web Conjunctions.

a l i c e b l u e f i f t e e n

I S S N 1 5 5 9 - 6 5 6 7