The Roses
Frank, why did you not render the sun?
Your father, feeling in Venice, all the time.
You were wonderful.
But your weather gave abstraction no vestige,
the cooler air of metaphor lost.
Making you royal again, the language
you spoke
built need out of the final Camel,
up until the last drink.
I Fall in Love With Old Rimbaud
He
is dancing with stars—
but not the kind that you find where
ice turns into Kanye.
Then again, maybe I’m not in love, or
what do you know about horses?
I kept all my letters. Then I jumped
into the world where
there is nothing that is not what it is,
only figs hiding
on the internet. The world is large—
the children know
what it means, but love is not
a funny mythography
or a ball of new twine,
difference peeled around me.
Suddenly, I wake to
a text from my sister
and then my friend says
he left his place
for a country
and I think it’d be great to do
that where I am.
Why are you keeping your letters,
if you’re keeping all of them hidden?
I am not afraid of what you imagine,
Rimbaud, only of the old commune,
where the bodies
hide together, like saying that
the outside is a lie.
Before Contemplating Thirds
she pretends to be the rock that she clings to.
One, for sorrow.
The twin is made of a rock.
The Madonna is made of ass.
The ass is made of donkeys.
The blue is made of a story.
The story is made of an old song.
The old keeps getting old
and I want to tell her that it’s okay to stay,
but Frank O’Hara would tell her to go
before the twin becomes a rock,
before the Madonna becomes an even bigger ass.
One for sorrow, one for divide.
There’s no one where epic
is too eternal.
Laura Carter: I am a poet and teacher living in Atlanta, where I was raised. I went to grad school over a decade ago, but I still work with students in writing classes every day. I've published eight chapbooks of poetry over the years, most recently with Dancing Girl Press.