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"Novel in the Making", "Triste", "One Night a Bear", & "Smiling Fish" by Laurie Kuntz



Novel in the Making


The story is short, and not very novel.

A man and a woman,

both brisk as cloud breaks:

The woman is not bad, but sometimes sloppy.

The man is not bad, but sometimes sloppy.

The man constantly reminds the woman of what she lacks,

which is the same thing that he lacks,

and they are constant in constantly doing this.

Till one day the woman just tires out,

the way a clock stops ticking after a spring has rusted.

And the woman stops listening,

and the man stops talking.


The space they share is silence.


                                                       No tick, no tock,


And they learn how to feel lonely,

                                                        Together.



Triste


There’s something sad about a daffodil on a windowsill in February.


The miracle of the blossom against grey panes,

the brazen orange mouth that speaks in wide O’s,

when I am still living in backdrop

of winter sounds, uncertain what each patter


and rasp might be.


The roll of wind against shutters.

Glasses shifting in a rack.

The dog scratching at its chain.


Not yet ready for this bulbous shout of color on a sill,

 or the comfort of my own loneliness yawning wide and loud.



One Night a Bear


pawed through our garbage tins,

jostled our refuse,

it stuck a dank tongue

into an empty pint of cherry vanilla,

knowing what brought it to that moment of sweetness—

a watermelon rind, cobs of corn,

the crusts of bread obsessively carved from squared edges.


All that could have sustained us,

was but a flicker in the unburdened appetite of a bear.

The bear could see our faces pressed in awe against the pane,

eyeing a still life of trash strewn over the lawn 

revealed in crescent moonlight.


The next morning we packed, 

traced veins on maps,

budgeted our solitary destinations 

for places other than the unchartered terrain of heart.


Memories of that night, 

summers and summers ago,

are fettered to a moment in a rented cabin.


The only thing not muted to our past

is a bear--come one night

when we were hungry,

but could only watch it feed

on all we had tossed away.



Smiling Fish


My son at the age of three asked:


Do fish smile?

Where does the blue go when the sky turns grey?

Why do I have to sleep alone if you don’t?


He never turned from my exasperations,

muted answers, or the continuous folding

of whatever it was in my hands,

keeping them from being empty.


Now, grown and the product of unanswerable queries,

he says that I am the one with too many questions,

demanding details, the fine tuning

of sound bytes, wanting, in every minutia,

the story without any revision,

becoming the constant north

in memory’s daily compass.


All of our rejoins are just remakes

of questions he stopped asking,

now that I have all the answers.




Laurie Kuntz’s books are: That Infinite Roar, Gyroscope Press, Talking Me Off The Roof, Kelsay Books, The Moon Over My Mother’s House, Finishing Line Press, Simple Gestures, Texas Review Press, Women at the Onsen, Blue Light Press, and Somewhere in the Telling, Mellen Press. Simple Gestures won Texas Review’s Chapbook Contest, and Women at the Onsen won Blue Light Press’s Chapbook Contest. She’s been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Prizes. Her work has been published in Gyroscope Review, Roanoke Review, Third Wednesday, One Art, Sheila Na Gig, and other journals.  More at:

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