let her
Laura Goldstein
dancing girl press, 2012
$7.00



LAURA GOLDSTEIN's poetry, reviews and essays can be found in American Letters and Commentary, MAKE, jacket2, EAOGH, Requited, Little Red Leaves, How2, Seven Corners, Text/Sound, and Otoliths She has four chapbooks to date: Let Her from Dancing Girl Press (2012), Facts of Light from Plumberries Press (2011), Day of Answers from Tir Aux Pigeons (2009), and Ice in Intervals from Hex Press (2008). She currently co-curates the Red Rover reading series with Jennifer Karmin and teaches Writing and Literature at Loyola University.







switch

An emptiness emerges and edges out a thick placeholder, embedded is a
switch as simple as electricity. A broth enters a being to find the correct
reception and light up a dark space with charged darkness. Where it’s made
and originates: a clear receptacle good for seeing into that soon seeps into me
and then the one I call you.

A pill that will somehow wake me to her ingredients: she uses blueberries to
stud a stack of pancakes. On this other hand, strawberries suggest red: a girl
with freckles sips bright juice through a pink straw while wearing rose-colored
glasses. I remember reading about this, I should know it by heart.

But bananas are better for brighter breakfasts for me and her: more mornings
running for the bus become memories as I’d rather keep my breath. Thanks,
details, you’ve done it again, a flick of the surgeon’s wrist and I’ll be the one
turning on.

Some pink scissors snip into simple statements. Knit-picking knowledge from
the page to the stage and then back again. Use a fuse to do it for you. Ask
Mapquest to track your path. I’ve fared fairly well in denial of dying.

In the shower I lowered my head so that he could wash it, he being me and me
being in the interim. This was a promise I’ll keep: how energy and entropy fell
in love and time exists because they continually stick it out.

I wrote this all from memory, ok? A light in my mind that couldn’t
communicate with the sun but then won. The illusion of language at all. But
the sticking point is this.