poetry

two poems

by Christie Wilson

How You Spend Your Weekends When you spend the weekend reading things you don’t understand, you must spend the week translating, sorting, propagating messages and then abandoning them in favor of new theories, more severe interpretations until you have exhausted all preconceived meanings and ideas and then adopted them as new. It is the only way to cope. When you spend the weekend staring at the river you must spend the week remembering the river and hoping the current will and will not carry you away, hoping the sunburn on your shoulder will not be too painful when you sleep and resigning yourself to a little bit of pain for a little bit of respite, a trade you should be used to after some years of living. When you spend the weekend listening to the wind you must spend the week forgetting what it said to you, letting it fall right out of your head, shaking your head if you have to because it is dangerous to let those things stay, put down roots, pull up a flag. By Wednesday, you might not recognize yourself.   Evaporation Is Drying I Like Best When you said the moon doesn’t have a core I misheard and thought you said care Out the window I can see the windows of all the places we’ve lived They pile against one another, obscuring their own views I sutured memories just under the surface of my calf So I could walk on them, wince, and walk again I tried to remember your forearm Until you returned home and I could see it myself Mutual symbiosis: I get to see you And you get to be seen I made physics my gospel So I could still believe in God What we know of sunshine I can’t keep in my head Now that we know the speed of light Let c stand for irony instead —

Christie Wilson lives in Illinois. Her work has been featured in Atticus Review, apt, CHEAP POP, Driftwood Press, Literary Orphans, and New World Writing among other publications. Visit her at christiewilson.net or follow her @5cdwilson.

Artwork by: Maksym Kaharlytskyi  
 
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