red booth
review
issue s16een
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Home Stretch
Night-driving, slipping past gas stations
and guard-rails gone static with speed,
you unwind and recover, erratically tense,
chain-smoking through the corners
of mouth and window.
I can tell when we’re getting close
not only by the sign advertising
CORNING 13 mi.,
but in the way you slide back, relax,
ease up on the gas pedal,
even though it’s 2 a.m.
and we’re tired. Suddenly you’re no longer
in a hurry. Your voice loses its impatient crackle,
becomes all at once softer in that home stretch.
White Feast
tonight we talked – the subject: children -
and I folded together tight and quick
as a bad poker hand,
those emotions rising coming up sharp as salt and vinegar,
rising and filling me and spilling over
in the ensuing conversation
I rinsed the dishes over and over,
turning my hands over and over
as my thoughts beat faster than my heart ever has
I am a cathedral of white silence,
I am the lone bat whistling among the eaves' feast
of rising and filling winds, full-out frantic amid all this.
- Caitlyn C. Bergeron
| Caitlyn is a graduate of George
Mason University’s M.F.A. program. She has had in a variety of magazines,
including Yalobusha Review and Red Rock Review. She lives in Virginia her
husband and many drafts of a chapbook |
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