CAROLINE DAVIDSON

AS I SIT HERE MISREADING EVERYTHING I WROTE FOR THE PAST TWO YEARS.

In my notes the word “seven” looks like “semen,” so the phrase I jotted reads, “Ink dries in six hours or semen, maybe less?” If that’s one offer, that’s the relief. I’m so sloped. I don’t retain rules for socializing. I have the strength of a diffuse root. Such character in this phallic marble statue. Semen minutes until the bed sheets dry. The cadence sharpens the breath, not the penis. We could only get to evensong, anyway— ease was wishful.  Hardy’s thrush, not Keats’ Nightingale. We need heated jasmine, and a cradle lake to ferry across on the second full moon this month. What to fiddle in. Symphonies composed by Germans conducted by Jews. I’m looking for a country I have no ties to. Nice dream adjustment. A pool moving away, clean line. Your comma really kills it, and I can’t get closer to you than that.

HACK WOULD BE 100 THIS YEAR

Polite-lipped leaving. Distance sees its own
scrapes of terror narrowing on the runway,

blossoms light on cinched fields
growling with sad snow, what makes it

sad is its particle hardness at
root, at nucleus, we are asked to

not take flakes down to their essential
areas, and not to look at man with baggage

this way—depressive bouts, recent split
from wife and creed, look he wants

my body for a little, but I’m in the air
already in head winds at 10,000 feet,

 

slurped the essential window to prepare

for the centennial anniversary of Hack’s
birth and the first Armory Show,

birth of the term Avant-Garde
in America— It’s 1913,

I search for Hack on East 14^th street,
I think I am wearing similar

slacks similar bowling-hat-
baldness and have similar

loneliness, though I don’t deserve
any accomplishment of memory

in the Gashouse District.

Demolition of, demolition of, of.

COMMON ARIAS

I.

Exit Ohio

But I can’t act as wine-stale
durable neurosis
for much longer.

Limp, I’m finished with you,
before you, tall sir—you are sweet
to let me scale these baseboards
with raw tongue.

I don’t fit, but I’m
bashed by how
quick you dredge
my reservoirs.

 

II.

Exit Ohio

Says my father,

we are not cutthroat enough

to be CEO’s-

My vacancy is honest, at least;

flat hotel eyes.

 

I need a new ledger, gauze. To stop 

            missing how medicinal the ocean

                        smells to the ill
in half-winter

half-tragedy 

            gulls me, unwary, well-

bloodied eyebrows cut 

            speech through matchsmoke

through Plain

City meadow drips,

Mennonite slow

churches

I’m ethnically ambiguous here

I don’t know where to fit.

 

Mechanized mantras spurt

through slow-

churned cement

 

A prison knife accents your

kitchen display.

 

III.

Blood makes
these deep
arguments,
percussive
roles.

Caroline Davidson received an MFA from the University of Colorado. Her poems have appeared in RealPoetik, Coconut, Tinge, Sixth Finch, Gulf Stream, Robot Melon, and elsewhere.