Carol Berg’s poems are forthcoming or in decomP, Sou’wester, The Journal, Spillway, Redactions, Radar Poetry, Verse Wisconsin, and in the anthologies Forgotten Women, A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poems and Bigger Than They Appear: An Anthology of Very Small Poems. Her chapbook, Her Vena Amoris (Red Bird Chapbooks), is available and her chapbooks, Ophelia Unraveling and The Ornithologist Poems are available from dancing girl press. She was winner of a scholarship to Poets on the Coast and a recipient of a grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
The Johnson Girls’ White Monte Carlo Speaks
What speed limits? There are no limits
when the girls were chasing Cassiopeia
or pouring vodka in the Little Dipper or
stealing Orion’s belt. I was their white
bat hauling them into the nervous sky with
my wings but their quarrellings hindered
my echolocation—arguing over who would ride
Taurus first. They had no sense of gradual,
the pedal always pressed to the floor, trying to out-wing
time itself. How dizzying with night’s large mouths
trying to catch us and all the whizzing stars flying past
calling out faster faster! And in the morning the girls’