issue #4 / spring-summer 2008
eMAGAZiNE
narrative and visual brain food
M
E
D
i
A
 Go, Literature!  
poetry feature >>
Suzan Lustig
Parallel Lines

 

easy to take for granted, the dynamic tendency

to exist            how do you quantify

the mass of a little girl               dreaming?

 

what force could make the pattern of her          d  i  s  p  e  r  s  e

 

through walls               to the other side?

how much magnetic power to retrieve the innocence

of an angel winged nightgown?  

 

this fabric was lenient enough

to let her cries be heard on this side:

 

/this side of clinging solids

/the floor, the bed

/the liquor cabinet

 

/this side of bones, and walls

/this side of guilty sheets

 

the physicist says “Over here!”

he can make sense of this

speaking of parallel lines                      an opening

                                                                             

between dimensions                 daddy extends

his arm, a solid shadow bending time

 

parental electrodynamics bind together

their silently condensed invention:

fiction appearing solid

 

/fields of beds /floors /liquor cabinets /daughters

/physicists,       /daddies and their sleeping

wives eventually awaken to their own transience dissolving

 

into nothing, dispersing

into something all too real

 

Shadow of Miss Veruca Salt

 

A Buddhist nun told me that a little

chocolate would be a wise option

for a nibble, now and then, to save

me from my tendency to indulge

in cravings of a potentially,

more destructive magnitude.

 

Fuck that,      I said,              I want the world.

I want the WHOLE world. . .I want it NOW!

 

Does that make me a bad egg?

submit
next >
< back
home
copyright 2008 S. Lustig