Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson
[ previous ] [ next ] [ notes ] [ #11: winter 2007 ]
from Figures for a Darkroom Voice

 

 

An axe splits a tree from the story of a woodcutter's lost children, but who splits you from me? Who splits the lighthouse in half? When heat brings down these separations, what revives you is not the boy with his wrong name, but the name with its wronged boy, an error in place of an outcome. A note about the author, cut with slant adjectives, trips its nouns around like drunks. You know the fable, how its boat filled with water when you held the baby until you weren't certain if its breathing has stopped or just matched your own. There is a tiny blue heart inside this votive & it marbles your house smoke in miniature deletions from a huge marker.

 

 

 

Someone's clapping before the curtain's down, convinced their convict's the same we've been watching, but brother, my girlishness has no handbook to lead you out of your escapades. For that, there's a novel called A Theory of Wax & Reticence, a milksop with no papers, a whole part of town under the reservoir, a sort of halo of grimy light appearing as if projected askance onto another boy reading his way out of delinquent afternoon's scale model of well-formed manhood.