Wendy Taylor Carlisle
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic and this spring, Doubleback Books reprinted her 2008 book, Discount Fireworks, available free at: Doubleback Books. Her website is www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com. Photo by Greg Comnes.
What a dinner party we have when I call them
to the table, each beloved face shining with appetite.
And you, others, so many dead or dying, whether or not
I know you, all I write now is your elegy.
The rest of this story has to be in someone else’s hand. I’m not brave enough to write out all this sadness. This story has to be turned away from any beautiful dread, from any sexy alarm, from excuses, from the biochemical shell game.
Curiosity’s delay of 13.48 minutes
isn’t forever, but it’s enough.
Enough time for a man to choke
with a knee on his neck.
before the virus becomes perpetual
before we become petulant
before our palms sweat
before we degenerate
and our humor gets morbid
Tiffany and the Nimrod took their first night in a motel just past the truck stop, in a scarlet and white bridal suite. The motel had plastic furniture in the lobby, and “Jesus loves you,” graffitied on the condom machine in the public restroom.
And aren’t you and your friends undismayed, standing there,
nose-to-helmet, pressing back American History
and the cops, dressed-for-a riot, or a high school play.
Maybe you wished for just a little hollering and shoving,
Tiffany and the Nimrod took their first night in a motel just past the truck stop, in a scarlet and white bridal suite. The motel had plastic furniture in the lobby, and “Jesus loves you,” graffitied on the condom machine in the public restroom.
Bambi stands poised on the page, elegant,
beautiful, but I am skeptical of deer. Deer can kill
with their antlers—from the Old French antoillier,
a horn in front of the eyes. Is this deer some rogue unicorn?
Come, tell us your story of romance.
If you only have a bad lover,
then a bad lover it is.
Invent and invent to make ourselves
guffaw, then we concocted a new
kind of government, a grief project,
How do you know when it’s done? I admit the children
were wrecked but the sad man gave me reasons to remain—
the sex was sex, his blows weren’t all that harsh and he never
shot at me but once. It’s a gift, I guess, to know how to leave,
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