a l y s e k n o r r
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pack me up in your covered wagon your war carriage wrap me in your guts like a sausage squeezed through a tube of inner flesh keep me safe when the wind blows across your face know that the feeling is not unlike that of dying on an unusually hot autumn day if the Bridge of Dread was a place we could return from the passport stamp would be a stack of syringes waving goodbye on a ginger tide to compare any of our nights together to heaven hell or limbo is to misunderstand the eternal oblivion that necessitates them things would be easier if we did not know where clouds came from fear & pride may cure each other in a loop of waves & synthetic froth I built a tower & it fell to the ground in a heap of language hell is a place that always pokes through the world is a dichotomy the alternative is lack of world an absurdity as large & heavy as the world itself a hanger is an object that hangs other objects not a person hanging by the neck what is the difference between dying & never having existed at all night a Non-event plays fiddle in my skull I brew him a kettle of nuclear tea noxious but forespoken & lustrous as the sun Non-Event I say Tell me about yourself he forks his forked tongue over fingerling teeth cut-bite knuckles on the carousel later we each ride piebald stallions up & down their brass braided poles grief is the hope that when it happens I will go somewhere & so will you we can meet at the corner café & you will have an espresso while I'll choose a raspberry lemonade nevertheless both of us there Non-Event's eye comets inside the periscope he rehearses his pentatonic scales a cirrhotic cinematic tune how terrifying how impossible that the world can keep turning long after the eyes shut & functions cease Do not keel do not pinch yourself at this brief caesura simply step back & admire the craft of the blade rubbed to a fine bright edge the point is the mind is a prison with death as its bars your life spent half in half out of breath until the day your mouth fills with locusts & the last thing you think of is mermaids how if you were a mermaid you might not have drowned to death & then in the end the absurdity of this thought rivaling only the absurdity of death itself |
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Sat. Oct. 16, 2004: A Georgia teen is charged with killing his best friend; sexual advance cited in slaying. |
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You lean in, close your eyes and— |
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ALYSE KNORR is the author of Annotated Glass (Furniture Press Books, 2013) and Alternates (dancing girl press, 2014). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Puerto Del Sol, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. She is the co-founder of Gazing Grain Press and teaches English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. |
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