C. Simic
Like a doll on wheels,
smears of rouge on
her cheeks and wax
lips that would melt
in the sun.
Her eyes are candy
cane colored and she
has hair like cotton fluff
spun into sugary strands
that hang down her neck,
disappearing inside a
Raggedy Anne dress.
I want to ask her
what the umbrella
is for but the local
bus arrives and takes
her away.
“When you play chess alone it’s
always your move”
C. Simic
No naked women across
the board playing white.
No Duchamp playing black,
hoping to expedite the checking
of his mate.
Just the men on their horses,
the bishops with their crosiers,
pawns in the field of battle
waiting their turn to die,
and the king and queen in
their proper places waiting for
what the night brings.
“Your invisible friend, what happened to her?”
C. Simic
They asked in such
a casual way I couldn’t
tell whether they were
truly interested or whether
it was part of the interrogation.
“I honestly don’t know.”
I said. It was true but no one
believed me.
“I left parts of myself-everywhere
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas.”
C. Simic
The way they used to make
confetti from ticker tapes
of stock market updates
and scatter them out sky-
scraper windows on special
occasion parade days.
Or the colored paper kind
thrown at New Year’s Eve
celebrations in banquet halls,
open bars, and supper club
lounges where all the middle
aged married women, and
the single mother divorced
ones, used the occasion to
lean over the bar to kiss the
young man behind it, home
numbers and times to call
scrawled on napkins furtively
passed as they kiss, as her
unexpected tongue tickles
his teeth, their eyes saying,
“I’ve waited all year to do
this. Let’s do it again.”
The World Doesn’t End
after C. Simic
But prevails in free hand drawn,
flat earth, invisible city,
imaginary world maps.
Look closely at the places
people don’t go: the ice tipped
equators, sun baked polar
caps, the dry bone ocean floors.
No one invades anyone else.
What would be the point?
Alan Catlin has been publishing since the dark
ages when folks cranked out homemade zines on mimeo machines which probably
only makes me him older, though not necessarily, wiser. He has recently
published a fictional memoir novel, Chaos Management with Alien Buddha and it
is available on Amazon. His most recent poetry book is Memories Too which
is the polar opposite of Chaos and is available from Dos Madres.
World Doesn't End was previously
published in an anthology by Bright Hill Press: Like Light.
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