poetry
How to Stop Being in Love with a Person You’ll Never Meet by Carol Guess and Daniela Olszewska
Tell the birds nesting in the eaves that it’s over. Tell them to flutter tall grass in Ohio. She is all Ohio now, wind lifting the cuffs of her sleeves. You imagine her wrists rubbed red from washing, doctor or mother or cutter or saint. Your no is a note tied to nothing and no one, easy to swallow with thimbles of gin. Absence is a promise best kept to oneself. A paradigm, the paradigm of numbed planning. She is still needlessly equidistant between the coasts. O, say it’s for the best three times fast then put on your housecoat and spin till the birds fling south for what’s going to seem like a very long time. The rubbed red will get everywhere soon enough.
From How to Feel Confident with Your Special Talents by Carol Guess and Daniela Olszewska, Black Lawrence Press 2014, blacklawrence.com. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.
64
AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2014