red booth
review

I like you better across the Pacific Ocean 
sealing yourself into letters and e-mail attachments. 
I can return your love with paper and postage. 
Bruises in my mind grow fainter, 
and words fade 
to memories 
of words. 
My dream is to wake this morning 
and get up on the side of reality 
I make while asleep. 
We would be constructed 
from a selection of sugar-coated memories 
rearranged at will. 
Two slender silk roses 
unfading like lovers 
embracing at the end of a movie. 
I miss the you of our good times, 
though my fiction writing hands 
cannot traverse time to rewrite our lines 
in the chapters already completed, 
which claim and reclaim 
dark stains on our past 
arranging themselves 
like a proof table; 
the result of our chemistry experiment 
will scald 
no matter how many times 
we measure ourselves and try to fit 
into the same relationship; 
d  i  s  t  a  n  c  e 
must be maintained. 
 
 
 

Poetic Field Research 

For years, I wrote about a boy, 
who didn't realize that his girlfriend 
existed apart from himself. 
I did not know, either. 
As I cried over the way my meaning changed 
in the revision she suggested, 
my creative writing instructor said: 
You may never find a man who will treat you 
the way you want, and you must carry on anyway. 
So, I set out as if I was not setting out, 
but rather drifting like a boat with no sail 
just to see what might be born from chaos. 
Indifferent hearts connecting and disconnecting 
as if The Wasteland were stage directions, 
rather than a diagnosis of mute hearts 

until you.  You, who licked salt water from my eyelids
in the ocean, who danced with me on Central Avenue
as a bellhop sang us a show tune, who brought yellow roses
and looked at my paintings, who built a Castle of Us, 
in which we’d live--New York, Atlanta, London,
anywhere together.  You. You, a hungry artist 
I could never feed, who ran from spirits 
I can’t see, who created little in our seven months
of pulling one another in opposite directions--
two bitter pills swallowing one another’s chalk
figures on cave walls depicting dreams 
of a future we never spoke of 
until silence blurred them
into images in poems that need editing,
though I now write about a girl
who knows her boyfriend exists
apart from herself,
and she is a compass
navigating a sea of possibility.
 
 

- Cindy Childress