ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

 
FIVE POEMS
by Carrie Etter


Small Awe

House by new house the builders despoil the view,
the stretch of land up to the sloping hills,
my daily awe. My landlord apologizes,
by letter, for my loss, apparently a commodity, the view,
that gains me the slightest decrease
in rent to compensate me for the weakened value of
my home, my small awe I look and look for,
always forgetting and remembering again.
Walking home from work, I glance to the hills
and quickly drop my gaze; embarrassed, made alone.



Black-Eyed Daisy

Fall asleep in the din of cicadas, awake
in birdsong. Humidity renders everyone a little more
desperate, yet sluggish. Not with hesitation,
but sensibility--an arm lengthens,
and I observe my arm stretching toward
and all its implications. Not so ordinary
a flower, the longer I find its dark center.



Choose Me

Designating a substitute
invokes a reckoning,
the diffuse wafts
circumscribed and brought
to account. An understudy
is not a replacement:
the role stands apart,
one costume bulging or
slack, with or without
gloves, degrees of rouge.
Who would know how
to submit to my pitch
and gestures? Who'd
want to? Someone must
serve my voice, counsel its
absence. Do you like ginger?
Do you use the word torque
as a verb or a noun?


Inviting the Prodigal Sister

Come back to the wizened table,
to the dinner I can make.
Ease covers the oak slab
like a white tablecloth. I'll stain it.

I'll stain it right, circle it with
a family of eight (cats not counted),
serve ham hock, fireweed honey, and,
inevitably, gravy. Behind the house,

a moose noses through
strewn garbage, the can knocked over
earlier by raccoons. Watch him pause, watch him
drag his long tongue over his lips.

The Last Word

Who was whose duenna that spring?
(If I gave you my pendant, I built you an ark.)

Do you remember the jacarandas? Do they bloom where you are?
(I snatched a piece of your wake and began quilting.)

Who relinquished, who undertook the endless darning?
(With twigs and flint I made a new lodestar.)

Do you remember your marginalia in my memoir?
(It's erased, yes, all gone, but for that last little sting.)

Carrie Etter is an American expatriate living in London. She finished her MFA at UC Irvine in 1997 and is presently working on her PhD in English. Her poems are in current or forthcoming issues of Barrow Street, Ttmes Literary Supplement, Leviathan Quarterly (UK), Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Salzburg Review, Seneca Review, and other journals. Her work also appears in LPZ #7.