Rachel Mindell
before but much better. In that time
having forgotten what noise for an
ambulance. You sketching no thing novel,
me as I appear
shadowed on sundown. Our house of newly
square practice resoled
by promise, skyward with
minimal routine, Saturday leisure.
Each door at least two uses and just one
teensy hole,
the fat wall of three-toned paint.
New words arrive each day,
yelping sudden ivy and up-dos.
Money in the mail. A newspaper’s bang
each morning and dinner party lala. Creamy
French dressing, compliments,
of exact proportion. The cushions
refusing lollygag. The cushions
frightfully aligned. I mature
overly sensitive, grow a touch screen. Very
good Botox indeed. Nothing
going like habit, fall comes again, but we
don’t have to.
A sudden impulse to write
about sighs that turn gasping.
Long hours reading directions
amid warnings on the Comet can.
An awkward compulsion
to replay the scenario where
vats of sudden acid
fire burn up soap
stars who come back
alive another season
played by a new actor.
Here, my baloney sandwich,
spiked with venom, a meditation.
The parallels between that lovely slew
and the weight of this blanketed room.
Dimension
Imagine we had never known a confine. That we had been left to imagine a world multiplied six times by six wide, by prospect. Instead you imagine the sound of my voice as I hurled it from a car headed north or imagine the way I might, from the road in drugstore sunglasses imagine your figure, watching television or reading or muttering
imagine that over, over until it lost meaning. You go to sleep, sleep and imagine that I’m there, waving from a yard flooded, there are sheep that imagine me their slaughterer
and you, a gyro. The kitchen, imagine is being demolished by enemies once friends now with money, they imagine we ought to be shaken up, trammeled to greater style.
Imagine the dream takes minutes, always, is instantaneous. You come to imagine chaos
of waking in standing water that floats the oven. Imagine the charge. Your attempt
to envision a return, mine, or to imagine someone shaking your arm, the alarm sounding that one might imagine, still under, as the noise a bomb makes on countdown from ten.
You might imagine that the bed is rising just before your eyes open and then imagine
it falling with a snap that startles the apartment to how you imagine an old dawn to which we awoke, broke and biking it to imagine a day where instead of the coffee I stand bedside to offer, you imagine a key, a hand pointed simultaneously at six adjacent doors.
Rachel Mindell is an MFA candidate in poetry and MA candidate in English Literature at the University of Montana. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Anti-, Horse Less Review, The Destroyer, Delirious Hem, inter|rupture, Pity Milk and elsewhere.