Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Firefly

I'm sick unto death
of keeping quiet in a jar

            -Matt Hart

And then Quiet comes out 
still shaped like the jar,
still rimmed at the top and gasping.

These weeks have been all
heads-down and hands-on-deck,
all fluorescence and panic, 

but if I imagine myself
as a firefly, I must also envision
the peeping of light from my backside

as either apology or bull's-eye, 
either a subtle hope or a thing 
helpless to stop.

The Binder Clip

makes the most of it:
survives by twist
and edge and grasp. 

I am saddened
by small movements: 
crow at the tollbooth,

coyote in the median,
blue glass on asphalt,
and so I do my job-

a flurry of nodding
and promising, a quiet 
of stacking and clipping.

The paper stays
together-solid and safe, 
it curls and stays.

Nobody's Business

A man comes from the city
in his clean black car and crushes
my hand in greeting. 

Choking on hello 
around the disaster of pain, 
the hundreds of bones colliding,

I spend lunch with my hand
tucked beneath my leg, its joints
singing a dirge while the man

with his perfect face speaks
of stasis, how there is no such, 
and so forth, straight teeth gleaming

the whole meal and meanwhile
the wedge of flesh under my leg is a daisy
hit by a motor bike, hurting

like nobody's business, 
and I think of anything but shifting, 
pray for stasis, for staying put.

Rachel Contreni Flynn was born outside Paris, grew up in a small Indiana farming town and now teaches poetry and practices law near Chicago. She studied history and journalism at Indiana University, and obtained her law degree from Loyola University in Chicago. She is a corporate attorney for a Fortune 500 company, specializing in employment law. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Florida Review, Epoch, Washington Square, Mississippi Review, and Forklift, Ohio. In 2003, Flynn received an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council and her work was selected by Stephen Dunn as winner of the 2003 Dorset Prize. Her first book, Ice, Mouth, Song is scheduled for publication by Tupelo Press. Flynn lives in Mundelein, Illinois with her husband and daughter.