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Fiction

Two Poems


Is it Dreamier Where You Are?

I walk among the hidden vestibules
On a perfectly flawed mission of getting older.

Soft white words are emblazoned on the sky.
To guide me? No, the thrashing of a dispirited

Angel, a trail of stones strangled
In the grassy wind. My gradecard.

Salutes the falsehood of this planet.
My errors are silver in the twilight.

I truly intended to unravel the stories
That children have carved on soap,

Penumbra of ancestries properly wired,
While someone sings on a lawn chair

Directions for my departure:
Jump through this door,

Our collective sadness is buzzing with opportunity,
Ten thousand bees lighting on ice.

 

A Rumpled Fortune to Live and Die By

A clotted parable on a flag on a-dune.

Your sinews rotate until they are numbers.

Your song is glib, your sacramental boo-hoo
Attacks me.

Fear of silence appears or reappears.

This is the silhouette of your father’s chassis.
This is the window.

Revile your loaf, the paper says.


Contributor

Noelle Kocot

NOELLE KOCOT'S poems have recently appeared in the Iowa Review, New American Writing, Fence, Conduit, as well as the American Poetry Review, from which she received the S. J. Marks Memorial Award. Her first collection of poems, 4 (Four Way Books, 2001), received the Levis Prize. Her next collection, The Raving Fortune, will be published by Four Way Books in 2004. A resident of Oberlin, Ohio, her next reading in New York City will be on September 21st, along with James Tate, Dara Weir, John Yau, and Matthew Rohrer.

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The Brooklyn Rail

AUG-SEPT 2002

All Issues