Carrie EtterAFTERSHOCK The dog’s girl took the tremble between her teeth like a blade of grass and whistled, a whistle not song but call that shook every body it brushed or that was yet another aftershock and the two traveled together, the bind and the rupture, every dog’s ears pricked, skin pulled taut as over a drum, each shudder a slap, a beat, twelve senses awake in the first hours after the quake, all miserably alert. BOSTON TO PROVIDENCE Two trains for the same city arrive from opposite directions—we board in unease, in chill incipient spring shade-- my own incipience recurring in its untimely, ungraphable past the budding trees, at the end of and along each branch and twig a small green-- past the flowering dogwoods and cherries milk and pink aloft and scattered beneath rumbling, whistling forward toward city and other selves known or emerging or even as the trees begin to blur BOOKSTORE READING We were between the stacks or thinned love and the kiss and its flicker of tongue the collective heat of our separate travels Mexico, Prague, Illinois nearly palpable one brush with the fingertips books teeming on the shelves, so many swerves of language, so much I gulped red wine I grew a little taller filigree and filament the fine work of followed your departure innumerable words we darkening tongue and stopped just before the door |
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Copyright © Carrie Etter 2015
Carrie Etter's latest collection, Imagined Sons (Seren 2014), was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. She has been blogging since 2005 at carrieetter.blogspot.com.
