When You Say Grotesque
~
You are the Woman who understands you dream the life of another
woman imagining the window swallows Everything. You can laugh
about this.
windows are greedy. the reflection of trucks belongs to them.
When you say grotesque do you mean Grotesque like In Ohio?
Dresses mean women busy With everyone’s business. There is no sex.
There is no touching. There is No one to sit back rubbing his chin
saying, Ah, grotesque. If you smirk, you know. You can laugh, again.
~
so every character trapped Named in the mind that imagines them
Are those blue curlers in your hair? Orange is a brave color. Can you
brave orange? Can you brave orange with grey slate. Can orange be
introduced to itself. See how the orange ends up breathless How it dies?
When the light changes they go away and here you should ask, if
you’re paying attention, who they might be. Your mind Assures you
You cannot leave yet. There is one more scene. The mind doesn’t
know
who they might be, either.
~
The mind imagines recycled paper That aluminum cylinder thing with
a red handle you crank and someone you remember sifted flour with it
and you didn’t want to sift flour But you want to Now
Think about it. The grotesque has No graffiti because graffiti is
beautiful. No one imagined it Swimming pools are television screens,
eventually. Sales at H&M don’t exist either. That woman Who
wonders about everything. Milk. Traffic. Frozen food.
You are that woman who wonders Whether To make eye contact or
Not when someone passes by, someone who you do not know. The
grotesque is not which is where you live.
~
The notion that everything is alright like The couch receives you from
the outside where Each street was unfortunately out in the world. The
notion is grotesque.
Men are not imagined. the face Gone wrong you’d like to believe but
you’re wrong. Wrong Wrong Wrong [insert someone else’s face here]
Where is the woman who meringues in Rio de Janeiro who makes
neither lilies nor Wheat nor Thunderbirds nor Drive-Ins in her head
Because she forgets
The life in her head. Her sequins forget their black glint without effort.
Here is the woman who insists her Dreams Her dreams are everyone.
Bio:
Ruth Ellen Kocher has been published in Callaloo, Cartier
Review, Blackbird, Superstition Review, Square One, ditch, the
Denver Quarterly, and Drunken Boat, Cimarron Review,
Ploughshares, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, The
Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, Crab Orchard Review,
and ninth letter, as well as other print journals, and has, as
well, been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine
She'r. She has poems forthcoming in various anthologies
including the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American
Poetry. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona's Fire, won
the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was
published by Lotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon
Knows You're Wandering, won the Green Rose Prose and was
published by Western Michigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in
2001, who also published my third book, One Girl Babylon, 2003.
She has been awarded fellowships from the Cave Canem Workshop, the
Bucknell Seminar, and Yaddo. Ruth teaches in the MFA program at the
University of Colorado-Boulder, but has also taught poetry writing
for the University of Missouri, Southern Illinois University, the New
England College MFA program, the Indiana Summer Writer’s workshop,
and Washington University’s Summer Writing program.