The Laurel Review at AWP: Table G14

If you’re at AWP this week, please stop by The Laurel Review table: G14

See the new issue, with work from an array of most excellent writers, as well as our brand new chapbook, Whither Weather, by Elizabeth Clark Wessel. This is the very limited edition with a typo, get them while you can (before we fix it next week).  

As well, TLR subscriptions are cheap right now.  One year (two issues) for an insane $5.00.  Two years (four issues) for $10.00 plus a free chapbook. 

You can also stop by just to say hello.  It’s a lonely crowded west sometimes.  I promise I’m fever-free and non-contagious. 

Here are four poems from Whither Weather to get you in the AWP book-buying mood:

Elizabeth Clark Wessel

Brief on Brevity

The leaf-strewn pool emptying out, the ice

sculpture of the happy couple, and

the iceberg, England-size, drifting (Where

else?) northward. All of this and more. Or

more than all of this. The drink warms up,

waters down, a slice of lemon perched

on its rim, a cocktail napkin getting soaked.

When I try to understand the second law

of thermodynamics, I get stuck in metaphor.

When I try to understand metaphor I never

get stuck in the second law of thermo-

dynamics. Or I am always stuck. This is

why I talk too much. And you, you never

talk enough.

Kinesthesia

The mind is tired.

What seems like a fly flies by the corner of the eye.

Someone says toothbrush, but in another language.

The toothbrush has its own language.

Swoosh or woosh.

Something moved.

The walls speak or is it the neighbors.

The walls take everything of meaning.

They keep it for themselves.

My mind is a wall.

There’s no truth except from the senses, said the Romantics.

Beyond the senses are more senses.

And beyond that is the land of the toothbrush.

Where everyone is some kind of king.

Snowstorm

Is it the neutrino

that flies through everything

disrupting nothing

*

trudging through drifts

of uncleared snow
it occurs to me 

with no other recourse

the foot

*

neutrinos drift around

(this can be inserted

anywhere)

*

I like this work

I'm less fond of this work
I'm never neutral except passionately so

*

I want you to get me to get home to get out to get through

*

The snow came through the window

but that’s because
the window was open

You have a beautiful head, the captor said. 

spring arrives

crisp and literal

a drunk

asleep in
the warmth
of the sun

when

the center
of the universe
is penetrated
we find you in it

the likelihood

any of us
exist
is so small
anyway

a ripple and then

another ripple