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An Obsessive Soliloquy by Carl Boon



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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