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The Legal Studies Forum
Volume 30, Number 1/2 (2006) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum Lawyers & Poets Scenes || Dreams RACHEL CONTRENI FLYNN __________________________ Gold Stars It was forbidden to touch the Hummels in my aunt's pretty house, arranged just so and shut in the glass cabinet, pigeon toed, rosy faced, holding kittens or balloons, their porcelain bellies bulging under pinafores and overalls . . . and it was wrong to kiss the high school janitor after track practice against a concrete wall in the band room vestibule where a fake velvet blanket draped the old upright piano, and a long row of trombones tilted in their shiny black cases . . . but these were the gold stars I gave myself when I thought no one was watching and nothing would get broken, and I was brilliant: easing the little brass latches and reaching in. [687]
The Physics of the Inevitable My hometown mourns the farm boy who kicked a cob stuck in the combine's flywheel, and I imagine his foot swinging just as he was thinking I know better than this, but it was too great, the weight of his crusted boot, not to follow through. And I think of the Viking ship pitching in its greasy groove all summer at Lake Schaefer, and how the carny said it don't hardly take any juice at all to run this ride— once set to rock, it just about went on its own. And I've made love like this, the whole time thinking how I wasn't, the whole time my mind watching my body as a thing in motion but not a mystery, more like math—more like the arc of a burlap sack tossed from Moots Creek Bridge, then the heavy spiral of rocks and cats. [688]
Blue Mantilla When you picked up the hitchhiker on the road to Red River though I said No, and he sprawled across the backseat, filled the car with a stink of sweat and shit and talk of duct tape, then dug through his triple knotted knapsack for something awesome to show us, twenty miles of forest from anywhere in New Mexico's wilderness, I hissed Stop the car, but you hushed me and smiled eagerly, as if we'd lucked into some great adventure. I didn't turn to look at the hollow book he pulled from his sack or the top secret items hidden there, but sat very still, curling my fingers around the door handle, and the plastic Virgin Mary glue gunned to the dash stared past me, her mantilla spread like the boughs of blue spruce standing mute under the sky, blank and huge and empty for miles. [689]
Poem on the Road to Depose My body is a sack of black spoons, and my dreams steal from me. My books are full of bite marks. The lights outside Milwaukee falter— good morning, corpse candles. I've come zealously to represent my client and will not listen to the click of the black spoons. Purified by diesel and the long gray bone of the sky, I am limb caught and swallowed by the monstrous laws of the dead. [690]
Lace Blouse Living never wore one outBecause it cost too much, and I couldn't arrange my face in the way such delicacy demands, I left the lace blouse in the vintage shop and bought coffee, more books. That night I dreamed of birds at the ocean, even then scolding myself: birds again— senseless, short lived, crying on the breakwater, hiding their faces beneath flimsy wings. [691]
Slip & Fall To guard against it, the grocery stores put plastic mats in the produce aisles with holes the approximate size and shape of the typical grape. I'm talking about liability. I'm talking about avoiding the awful snap of collar bone on linoleum, the shatter of graham crackers and bifocal glasses. I've been worried about the birds I cut from construction paper that didn't look like birds but anvils or trowels. Anyway they did the job. Fewer bloody splotches against the glass, fewer reasons to feel guilty for getting in the way of hunger and abject joy. I've been lost in the oil slick of a junco's wing. I'm dark and sticky with it, but regardless, all day I've been singing a poem about traveling, singing even as I reach for the phone to talk about insurance and risk and plausible options, singing even though everything I dream these nights is forests and hands and bones and the winter rattles me. It's a song about the end of caution— an onyx pendant slipping from my neck and smashing on the supermarket's asphalt where gulls are painted to ward off a mess. But harm is not worth avoiding if the cure is smallness . . . I wheel gladly beyond it to the hole in the sky where birds are spiraling. [692]
Rachel Contreni Flynn was born outside Paris, grew up in a small Indiana farming town, and now teaches poetry and is a corporate attorney for a Fortune 500 company, specializing in employment law. She studied at Indiana University, and obtained her law degree from Loyola University in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College in 2001. Her poetry 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. Her new collection of poetry, Ice, Mouth, Song was published by Tupelo Press, in 2005. She lives in Mundelein, Illinois with her husband and daughter. All of the poems here were first published in literary journals. "Gold Stars" and "Lace Blouse" first appeared in River City, "The Physics of the Inevitable" in Heliotrope, "Blue Mantilla" "Poem on the Road to Depose," and "Slip & Fall" first appeared in Mississippi Review. All the poems appear in Rachel Contreni Flynn's first book, Ice, Mouth, Song (Tupelo Press, 2005) and are reprinted here with the permission of Tupelo Press. |
