Ballard Street Poetry Journal

these scissors have seen to
outliving almost all of my epics:
those lives that have lapsed on the page
always bent on some symmetry

how can anyone relax in this house anymore?
a glass of water that was meant to be
drunk hours earlier keeps putting me in mind
of the place on the window where the bird had struck

then the pencil trying to arrive at another world
where my past is not printed alongside its spine
w/its hauntings having taken what life I had left:
seems twice now I’ll have forfeited these dreams

Mark DeCarterets' poems have appeared in AGNI, Caliban, Chicago Review, Conduit, Cream City Review, Hotel Amerika, Killing the Buddha, Mudfish, New Orleans Review, Phoebe, Poetry East, Salt Hill, and Third Coast as well as the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2000), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader (Black Sparrow Press, 1999) and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. Work is also forthcoming in Boston Review, Coconut, failbetter and Salamander.