by Laura L. Close

What care I of a wolf’s tongue, (or a tree
frog’s,) whether or not he has it lolling out.
I am not a puppet or even the string of it.
I will not pull strings. My mind is sort of
there, bodily. I don’t know you and you
don’t know me, but we are who we are
if you know what I mean. Like mist that
rises above the ordinary and mundane
drought, an idol of mud sees the hash tag
of a heroine as a godsend. Kits I ponder:
twelve skeins of sweater yarn, Caesar salad
lite, a crème brûlée with torch. Hero of
heroes, if I am telling the truth diagonally,
I didn’t buy the dollar store slime or toss it.
The Turkish carpet has flown here from
another universe, but the genie does not
come out of it when we try to rub it. When
everything I’ve learned comes crashing to
pieces, I curl up into a ball and pray to God,
trying to hear his voice, but all I feel is my
own body crying out in confusion, the feeling
of extreme loneliness, absence of love, feeling
that my feelings are damning and yet all I see
is a patch of curbside lawn and wonder what
the neighbors could think who are surely
unbelievers, or perhaps they know the secret
of life and how to speak to God. What
designates the opinions in a hedge? The little
breezes whisper fact or fiction. I declare war,
but only in a game of cards.

Laura L. Close is a graduate of the MFA program at George Mason University for which she has written the manuscript The Sound and Sense of Leaves (2010). She is the author of TParty (2012), self-published by iUniverse. Her poems have also appeared in Raga Zine and Jerry Jazz Musician.