NATASHA KOCHICHERIL MONI
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Books
  • Readings
  • Publications
  • Hire Natasha
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Links
  • Home
  • Bio
  • Books
  • Readings
  • Publications
  • Hire Natasha
  • Contact
  • Blog
  • Links

Day 10, Poet 10: Joelle Biele

4/10/2018

 
Picture

Postcard
Union Pacific Transfer Depot, Council Bluffs, Iowa
 
One day you wake up in a town you can’t name
and there’s no way to plot a path from A to B. 
You hear a train, then you don’t, the sound
 
bounces off the hills, gets trapped in a gulley
or skims a church spire only to scatter
over a silo that dreams of nothing but thunder
 
and grain. Who says the route is not the shortest distance
between two points, says it’s a branching river
and you must get in your little boat and paddle
 
down each grassy inlet and tiny stream—as if sets
of unreadable alphabets opening beneath your feet
and clambering over fence posts were a good thing?
 
I don’t want to come to the edge of myself, don’t
want that sinking towards a bottom that never seems
to come. Sometimes I’m held together with pins
 
and strings. I’m pieces of fabric, a dress waiting
to be seamed, or I’m the stitches ripped out, threads
blown across the floor. I want to lie on a cool, clean
 
sheet, feel it drape over my face, arch my back
like a cat, be reduced to nothing but bone,
the big wind that races across the field, bend
 
the trees back, push clouds, be shadow, whip past
blouses hanging on the line like women waiting
for their lives, all of it silver and into the sun.


Previously published in Tramp (LSU Press, 2018).

Joelle Biele is the author of Tramp and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The Complete Correspondence.  A Fulbright professor in Germany and Poland, she is currently the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s Writer-in-Residence, doing writing workshops with Maryland high school students.


Comments are closed.

    Blog Host

    Natasha Kochicheril Moni is a writer and a licensed naturopath in WA State. Enjoying this blog? Feel free to put a little coffee in Natasha's cup, right here. 

    Archives

    March 2019
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    May 2016
    March 2016
    December 2015
    October 2015
    August 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    April 2014

    Categories

    All
    AWP 2016
    LA Story
    Poetry
    Steve Martin
    Two Sylvias Press

    RSS Feed