Poetry by Laura Carter

               ​Jody McIntyre CC




Weather


Morning is cool, the way a long array of early mornings can be. I step into it, take my coffee upstairs, and wait for it to warm up. If I could only finally eat something solid, I would. If I could only finally sneak up on the outside, as if to say, “I don’t belong here.” Coyote, owl, cricket: each of them would hear me. Each one would rise out of its resting place, convinced that it was the most important creature to appear. Each phoenix would appear slowly creeping up to the flames. What else could they do?

*

What do you see when the snow first falls? I can’t remember the last time I saw it. The loveliness of pure ice, as it is called. But what does the heat say in return? Too much of a glass away from fracturing when summer hits. So much torpor of weather, yet spring makes it feel so normal. As far as I can see, I want to fall into it with my eyes closed, escape the world, never return. This feels ancient. I don’t know how they don’t see the signs: asleep at the wheel, thyroid acting up, faking it all the time. So.

*

I rest up. Nothing seems weather-y at all. But I know that the crux of things is that Eliot didn’t like weather. But what about the poems? There’s not much left there. I am attached to culture as much as I can be, but I can’t fall off it. I need to fall. Mom does, too. Where in the morning did this illness find us? Was it the longest day of the year, or the longest night of the star brigade? I assume, perhaps wrongly, that you feel it, too. I don’t know whose side you’re on, but I always hope it’s mine.

*

I feel it’s wrong, always: the corrections of weather. It’s always coming in from somewhere new. So they say. I’m sorry I lost you, I want to say, but always to the wrong one. And, really, no zeros, like the row of them I saw once. I wish I could claim salvation from the clouds or from the interiors of mangoes. But I can’t. I wish I could wash myself to the shores of the state, lay up there, like waiting to be pardoned. It doesn’t make any sense to wait on the executive branch, someone says. Yes, I know.

*
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Laura Carter lives in Atlanta, GA, where she was born and raised. She finished grad school in 2007, and she has published several chapbooks since then, including three with Dancing Girl Press in Chicago. She teaches college writing and humanities.
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