Blankness, Much
Word count: 120
Paragraphs: 20
Hot air blows on the 48th parallel of my__________.
Saltartory/no salutatory
Blankness,much.
As green is the way of my favorite oxen
Stores by the still
Still by the store
And green is the way.
Theoretically I rise up from the greenness of the world.
I catch birds falling out of trees.
In rage I crack broomsticks
On the lightning bolts of the Creator
Who breathes into me the slow strangulation
Of what was as hot air blows.
And the shards of music I strain to hear
Are bandaged now in a tidy heap,
Yet I rise up to catch them in embarrassing greenness
And commit them Lord, blankly, into your tattered green hands.
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.