Caroline Knox’s collection A Beaker: New and Selected Poems was recently released by Verse Press. Her work has appeared in The American Scholar, The American Voice, Massachusetts Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry and elsewhere. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 1988 and 1994.








Easter

 

Jelly Bird Egg, the presence of a soup of beans

 

sends the consumer, can and all.  Ice cream

 

resists chews by that very consumer by aggregate of sugar pustules.

 

 

 

Jelly Bird Egg, made by Psychotherapy Chicken,

 

full of willingness to doubt self, others, and be pleased,

 

here at the Snazzatorium, to apprehend

 

just such a Jelly Bird Egg as God rolled from her or his mind for you.


       

 

 

 

 

 

I Speak out of the Exeter Book

 

in a “mildly frightening way ... usurping the human

 

prerogative of speech.”  A parallelogram

 

like the deflected element in cutwork

 

(an embroidery technique), I ask you who I am.  Diane Glancy

 

said, “These letters can be read as holes in the text.”

 

You can look through them.  What is there.  Fabio and Charro.

 

 

 

The hole is a gate.  I am a field like a sieve.

 

I may have been made by Hwaetbert, Abbot of Wearmouth,

 

and friend of the Venerable Bede, who invented the rosary,

 

or Hildegarde von Binghamton, maybe a SUNY grad student?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Boot and Bonnet

 

He picked me up in the vaunted car.

 

When Milton wrote, “The gilded car

 

 

 

of day,”  he meant this car, a NASCAR

 

reject, with a broccoli elastic holding the tailpipe on the car.

 

 

 

“‘Special’ is such a general word,” he of the car

 

allowed to me, dreaming in the car.

 

 

 

Car

 

and Driver is his favorite car

 

 

 

magazine.  In Connecticut they have Connecticar,

 

which brings you borrowed books in its car.

 

 

 

A worn Bokhara lines the trunk of the car.

 

Brits say boot for trunk, and bonnet for the front of the car.