1 by candice wuehle
Air
Dear,
I talk less. Crowds happen and effort. Luck makes the words that cause listening. In the enclosure I wait for anyone to say in order there are only two possibilities and then I do it carefully. In the nail care salon a woman from a state I was once in told the television doctor she was held in a cellar for ten years. I put on an iPod and listened to Bruce Springsteen and paid money and left. It is fine to never experience murder emotions. To have medium-feelings. I am a thin woman. I can slip out of many constructions, I slipped out of that. In German I have long been a machine only to now be dead. How? |
Each completed digit creamed in bronze, lacquered decay
and I think to say that when she saw her self styled in a mirror that woman thought her |
hair was beautiful. Fine. I too seek even now.
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Dear,
It means not twisting your head to look at your own back. |
Dear,
I write to tell you I saw a Ouija run in reverse. |
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K
Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K
I want idiot
words: learned helplessness. In the clearing I tell the story of your last telephone call. You said violence. I was in a Borders, I said I’m calling your twin. I am unavailable to you. I heard the Podcast: Dangerously Unqualified Dating Disasters which our friend now airs with whom you stayed that day in the city just today. My trapezius has ached since the yes-yes device. |
Dear,
Re-present your ear when slapped and the slapping is no longer an assaulting. |
Dear,
Are you an asterisk off the Word I used oftener once? Questions like the above are why star wishes are criminal. We cannot fall through space. I could step into a closet and close the door and after three days and two hours and six minutes step out and say that was three days and two hours and six minutes. No I couldn't. I couldn't know how much longer I've been here. I could if space were a through-construct; if when trapped I did not relapse and answer double. |
Dear,
I try to feel formal pressure but there isn't enough. I have a wig which looks like my own hair I never wear it out. Not anything could make me send. Not all the arms, not any soldier in this zone. Anything could make me |
Dear,
Anything could make me want to add an end. Tend my life through amendment. I have avoided rule and offers and am still prosecuted by subject desire. The man who answers his mail can call it love. Never call one crushed royalty. Easy descent to indicative. |
Dear,
Life is for jobs and so What is the World For? Days. Days of effort until the original poem surfaces through a search engine. |
Dear,
To answer your text: it’s off to be returned. I saw a child in a mask with another mask with another mask with another mask. So many straps. I didn't think of you, I thought of me. What drag — an after-event that won’t occur without the other — no, more like popular radio: I’m survivin’. |
Dear,
In the museum there is just one ash-man. One is all I need to remember all the space is not mine. My body is getting better at being my own. I've been breathing. Anyway I can and won’t erase your address despite you not not needing to erase mine over there not any time away, not needing to say: Dear, it’s the lungs and it isn’t the air, it isn't count. I mean cut off the supply, I’m |
CANDICE WUEHLE is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa, holds a Masters in Literature from the University of Minnesota and is a PhD candidate at the University of Kansas where she is a Chancellor’s Fellow. Some of her poems can be or will be found in The Volta, Inter|rupture, NOÖ, Boaat, Fairy Tale Review, BlazeVOX, SOFTBLOW, Similar:Peaks:: and SAND: Berlin’s English Literary Journal. Candice’s chapbook, cursewords, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.
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