caffeine destiny spring 2008

Elizabeth Hughey Walk Slowly On Like slipping a note under the wrong decade. Like waiting for the bean of loneliness to sprout between shoulder blades. Why look for a bracelet you never wore? Do you owe it to the wrist? Walk slowly on, miniature horse in a corset. Tug not the blue bows from your mane. If two ladies or young girls are walking together and they meet a third who stops to speak to one of them, the other walks slowly on and does not stand awkwardly by and wait for an introduction.* To be on track. To be on a track. Circle the circle. Circle and circle. Tame the geese, and winter will hold off like a chef dabbing his brow. The footpath around the lake. It was innate. It was an equation. Shot forward like a rubber band while the two women stopped to exchange teeth. Then it seemed that a third of the women were walking slowly on, while the rest held back, and the chatter swarmed up and smoked through the arteries of the park, so that you couldn't tell one whisper from another, like smelling the difference between Darjeeling and Earl Gray. Lead me to the water, model sailboat. *Emily Post from Etiquette: The Book of Social Usage Say Nothing of the Dog and the Dying Because we know very well that there are "dogs" and there are "the dying." Just over that fence....No. Today is not a book report. Sure, every fleece is golden in the right light with the right lens, but I need a new way to talk about calcium, not by milligrams but by the pliable architecture assembling itself like a room in the 2am dark: first shapes, then bones. When I take a pill, sometimes I feel like I am saying something. Something like, "Isn't it funny how the barn changes once you learn that a Doberman used to sleep in it?" Elizabeth Hughey's book Sunday Houses the Sunday House was awarded the 2006 Iowa Poetry Prize and was published by the University of Iowa Press.