{Words: Selected Works.}
About Carrie Nassif:
“I am a clinical psychologist in private practice and have always had poetry as a way to express those sorts of things that float around in my head but I ‘know better’ than to say out loud. This poem was written on the drive to a family gathering on one of those bright bitter cold days this past January. It had been a long time since I’d been in the back seat for a long car ride and it gave me the time to think about what I was really seeing.”
Manifest Destiny
Carrie Nassif
Squinting through dusty hazed safety glass
irritatedly shading your eyes
with your awkwardly angled hand
from the fat and sloppy sun
staring you down through the windshield
as you try to drive through the glare
oblivious to the
ricocheted shards of it
littering the glistening cornfields
scattered among inky black cows
stranded among the tawny splinters
(their moist noses mull you over:
mute in their glittery evening stillness
as you screamed past in your aggravation)
too steadfast and se lf-important to regard the dumb beasts
or how they absorb the source of your aggravation
with such simple aplomb
letting it roll off their methane hazy backs
like future food will.
___
About April Pameticky:
A full-time middle-school teacher, poetry reminds April that there’s a bigger world out there to be shared and experienced. She enjoys the Wichita creative community and looks forward to making further connections. Her narrative poetry can be seen in Chiron Review, Poetryforthemasses, and Naked City.
Heated Summer
April Pameticky
The cicadas call from elm to oak,
furious rattles of warning, my body
aches to lie down in the light, bend
low before I break under the sun’s
white-gold gaze, melt into the brown
sod dormant from drought. My skin
smells humid, flesh sliding loose on
bones. The haze bends cars into a
shimmer of water, and I dream of ice
cubes and mint. The air so slick like
butter across my skin, the grass baking,
the trickles of sweat sliding down the
back of my head. Veronica’s velvet
voice blending into the fire of the day
and I am angry only because I hurt.
You do not Write Poems about Rhinoceri but You wish You Did
April Pameticky
I
You sit in the back, the chair functionally uncomfortable, and wonder
what you are doing in the basement atrium—you were never her student,
never allowed yourself to be a poet. Concealed carefully under your coat
is the chapbook you purchased here. You pretended you already owned
it, had always been a follower, were familiar with her work. You sit in the
back and marvel at her curiosity.
II
A debate rages for the family rhinocerotidae as to the plural form of that
“giant, horn-bearing herbivore.” You are warned not to fall into the
rhinoceri trap, to beware of making this egregious error of pomposity,
although you still believe that “rhinoceroses” is a little like “fishes” and
“mooses” [although apparently “mooses” is never used orally, and “fishes”
is only okay sometimes]. You want to own rhinoceros like you own grief, that
river that you know, but curiosity requires energy and imagination and you
don’t always get enough fiber.
III
You took a class because you still secretly believe one can learn to write. They
were so excited, so pleased to be a part of the struggle, and they shared around,
admiring and snapping fingers in metrical homages to effort. In their sweetheart-
butterscotch way, they only wanted to give you permission, the “nod” to take
what you already owned. The irony of all the degrees, notebooks, rejections piled
in the corner with dust and clots of cat fur all announcing I am a Writer has not
escaped you.
IV
You sit on the couch, the one that smells like feet and dog. It used to be fashionably
Taupe, now more the color of grit collected under your nail. You sit on the couch
with your phone in your hand. You must make meaning from what you have learned,
and you struggle to find words for the soundless dark. Grief is beside you eating
cereal straight from the box, his arm a slow weight across your shoulders as your
head fills with sand. You want to tell Grief that it was better when Anger came over
to hang out, fury a heated ant hill of tingles up your throat, but he’s made himself
comfortable and will probably stay for awhile.
V
Poems about rhinoceri are never really about rhinoceri.
