The Year I Went Without Seeing a Ghost
The Year I Went Without Influencing Anyone
I would be kept up late into the night by a parakeet. Us two the only ones who knew the whereabouts of the newest draft. Maybe the only good thing to ever come out of a briefcase. Though, in retrospect, everything he tweeted me was a fib. Notes he repackaged to help lessen his grief. I took the capsules you left on the windowsill. Number three on the “To Do List.” In between relisting my stiffening self as a still life. And updating the light show for my power nap. Okay, we are finally recording. As luck would eventually have it. The forest having lost a step or two to the shadows. Here, some moss offering up its moist cough. There, this mound of leaves dumbfounded by our veiled threats. It all seeming to change when Nature started thinking of itself as therapy rather than art. Playing the smallest of parts in a play. I am so done with my blood when it runs outside my body. So done with my son. Doubling as me in yet another pathetic remake. A mop bars my way to the past. A chair regrets it kept taking these stands. And ended it ages ago. And this mattress keeps talking trash. A little thing it likes to call “The Stop Over.” And had made into a poster.
The Year I Went Without Hurting Anybody
Mark DeCarteret was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He’s studied with Sam Cornish, Bill Knott, Tom Lux, Mekeel McBride, Charles Simic, and Franz Wright. He’s hosted and organized two reading series. Co-edited an anthology of NH poets. And was Poet Laureate of Portsmouth NH. Twice, a finalist for NH Poet Laureate. Prose poems from his manuscript The Year We Went Without have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Asheville Poetry Review, BlazeVOX (which recently published the first chapter of his novel Off Season), Gargoyle, Hole in the Head, Map Literary, On the Seawall, Plume, and Nixes Mate (which recently published his seventh book of poetry lesser case). He sang and played guitar for the Shim Jambs. And sings and plays drums for Codpiece.