An Obsessive Soliloquy
Please cover the bananas—
their brown scars
in the morning remind me
of my mother’s skin
after the surgery—the chaos of wires,
the chaos of death. It cannot be
like that. Tablecloths consume me;
placemats rise to the tier of demons,
so resistant, so unfulfilling.
When I was ten I read of a man
who turned a thousand miles back
to remove a stone from the road
(he remembered) and almost thought it
beautiful: the sharp tat-tat
of the horses’ hooves on pavement,
the calm that comes with precision.
Still, issues arise: the errant, fallen
hairs of a would-be lover
on the sofa, her blindness
to breadcrumbs and dish towels.
One must sacrifice, I suppose, for love,
yet the instinct glares the way
a bad man glares, intent on harm.
I’ve sprained my wrist
for the exactness of mulch,
but I am better now; I listen
to your stuttering voice, my sweet,
and hardly flinch.
Carl Boon
Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.
Twitter: @hiway61carl
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