Caroline Richards
Caroline Richards is a graduate of Trinity College and a third year MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, The Trinity Alumni Magazine, and is forthcoming in Southeast Review. She serves as the managing editor emerita of Blackbird.
Addiction poem with watercolors
This is how I explain it: here is your body
turning in the night. Here is hip
and metal, acrid breath and vertigo. Here,
a mouth and the floodlit parking lot.
Over there are neither of those. Over there
is a carnival, a man on a tightrope wire.
There is not where we are. There is
a 7-Eleven full of couples buying bananas.
There, the dock workers stepping from
motion to pier. Here, the lighthouse
panning for wreckage. Here the cigarette
that sets the curtains alight, the last cocktail
olive left on its stick in the glass on the piano.
Here, the wet crescent it leaves on the wood.
There is the man walking the dog. Here,
a dog walking the highway underpass at night.
There, the thrush’s eggs, untouched. Here,
the fingers that reach to wind your mothers
music box. There, the sound it will make.
Here the inertia and plane. There the paper,
an elbow, and the wind. There the kite.
Here is the empty museum bench. There is,
as I said, where we are not. There is the girl
with the braids like wheat. There is your mother
dancing, young, whose hands you will see
when you arrive there hanging all
your watercolors on the refrigerator door.
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Image by Rahib Yaqubov from Pexels
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