FOREWoRD
Doritt Carroll’s micro-chapbook is at times elegiac, at times feminist, always human, and always entertaining.
With these lines and so many others: “the dog lies half in the road half on the curb / like a comma in a sentence you can’t take back,” Doritt Carroll draws me in with vivid images, memorable lines, and highly charged language that feels like truth. Yes, the dog’s shape is like a comma, I think. Yes, I have seen my own dog lie in this way, and the comma of these lines, of course, belongs in a sentence—that’s grammar, but “sentence” is now both language and punishment for an imagined offense, as well as the words of a verbal argument. And as I read, I realize again and feel what I must have suspected initially, that this dog has died, hit by a car. The tension established here in the “sentence you can’t take back” is not an accident as the poem moves toward family, mistakes, missteps, the “momentary flame of anger,” “never dependable self-control,” and mistakes that can never be reversed. Here Carroll is recreating a purgatory I have lived in, a world I know to be true where, “sometimes past and present stand / on either side of a pane of glass.”
“my mother eats ice cream while dying” begins, “bird boned and buckle-mouthed she draws / on chocolate clown lips with the spoon.” Hand to heart, if that doesn’t make you open this book and read, I don’t know what would. These poems are elegiac and lovely, replete with sorrow and heart warmth. The language is precise, as in these lines about martinis whose “windex taste of solitude bites / our tongues.” Detailed and beautiful, the moments in these poems genuinely move. She writes lines you’ll want to quote, metaphors you’ll wish you’d written. More than once, I found myself, saying, as the character says, “yesss.” Oh, these poems are good. From our dead that we don’t really want back (!) to the description of a husband snoring: “his lips make a sound like / he’s being defeated / in a dream argument,” to the story of a life encapsulated on a page, these ten poems are the poems you need to read today, the poems you’ll return to tomorrow.
Laura lee washburn
a
m e d i t a t i o n
o n
p u r g a t o r y
table of contents
erev kaddish
my mother eats ice cream while dying
breaking the filly
we come warning you trouble is
a meditation on purgatory
muybridge
and never stops—at all
the snow is there faint
freud watches the birds
our dead
erev kaddish
the lips of the nearly dead sink in
as if they will leap past the teeth
throw themselves down the well
of the mouth
the veins of the nearly dead stand up
on the backs of their hands tectonic like ridges
pushed up by the plates of life and death
struggling past each other
the feet of the almost dead are restless
circling seven times this groom
with whom they are betrothed
but not yet acquainted
the bones of the almost dead
reach up through stretched skin
for our fingers our hair our wrists the ropes
we do not throw them
my mother eats ice cream while dying
bird boned and buckle-mouthed she draws
on chocolate clown lips with the spoon
then drops it and digs with her fingers
licking them all
the way to the nub of her wrist now my mother
is palming fudge chunks clapping
them into her face like a kid
in a high chair eats Cheerios
every morning i buy her a new pint in spite
of the nurse’s disapproval to see her
half-live mouth quirk up
in a check mark smile
to watch her screw her eyes shut
like she’s blowing out
birthday candles chisel
her fingernails under the lip
of the cardboard lid and surrounded
by a swarm of no and no and never
when she finally pries it off she says
yesss
breaking the filly
we say put blinkers on her
change jockeys
we say drop her in class
tie up her tongue
we say is there a problem
with the conditions
that makes her not want
to open her legs in a full
stride of willingness
and will a whip cure it
we come warning you trouble is
/
says the fake IRS call buzzing
from a boiler room in Tianjin a crinkling
in the air like the sound of flies on a windowsill
waving their last legs
/
on the screen before me is the PET scan emailed
by the hospital that shows my mother’s lungs dappled
with cancer like the Rorschach spots
on butterfly wings
/
the “standard uptake value (SUV)” of the dye
that proves malignancy is any number over 2.5 my mother’s
tumors measure 17, 5.8, 13, and 27 as if they drank this
nectar greedily and quick
/
in an attachment to the message is a prescription
for narcotic patches when pasted on the patient’s back
their saturated gauze is candle white the patient’s lungs rise up
to it like moths
/
gradually the patient curls in upon herself
knees to chest head to knees as if the illness is a fist
squeezing something gossamer it snatched
from air
/
each breath the agitated rattle of something
that can’t quite shake itself loose gibberish
a repetition that means nothing this is your final—
this is your final—
a meditation on purgatory
the dog lies half in the road half on the curb
like a comma in a sentence you can’t take back
a small humped bridge between right now
and the second before the speeding car
the intact part of the day receding beneath you
like the ground from under a climbing plane
sometimes past and present stand
on either side of a pane of glass
and stare at each other a visit
between the life you intended
and the one you’ll be living after
the unlocked gate the fleeting lapse of concentration
the momentary flame of anger on the kindling
of your never dependable self-control
sometimes your four red finger marks linger
on the face of your child like pox
sometimes you lift your eyes and let your partner see
they’re rimmed and empty as old cups
sometimes when you call
the dog does not come back
muybridge
my husband snores as if
he’s calling for help in
another language
or through water
his lips make a sound like
he’s being defeated
in a dream argument
but but bu –
now his legs are running under
the comforter like those first time
lapse photos that proved that only one
leg of a galloping horse touches
the ground at any moment
the rest heavy as it is
hangs suspended
between there and here
and never stops—at all
i sat on the back porch as our handyman’s
daughter explained the world to me
people keep on pondering upon
the problem she said when they should be
pondering upon the solution
she repeated it pondering upon
and it made me think of walking
on water—upon a pond—
we were both impressed with the phrase
she was eighteen i think
had dropped out of high school
and was in the first flush of love
with a boy at the grocery store where she worked
my mother had given us lemonade
that tasted like the day sharp bright
early spring but what i remember most
is how this girl embodied her name
Hope
she shook her sandy bangs out of her eyes with
hope
drew hearts on the condensation of her glass with
hope
and every time she named the boy little bells in her voice
joined the ice cubes in her glass in a clink of
hope hope hope
she was pregnant already
although neither of us knew it the baby
was three months old when the boy
speeding and high crashed
their Chevy into a pole and killed them both
her mother raised their baby who
of course had her own name
but always answered to Hope’s
daughter
the snow is there faint
as a word spoken
in another room if i
squint i can make out
the flitter of it white
gnats pestering a streetlight
sometimes the yoga
teacher says breathe in
with your soul and i think
i have no soul
nothing but my tin
can empty self washed
and ready for recycle
sometimes in church they preach on
the sense of the faithful and it’s
a foghorn that’s supposed
to steer you toward or away from
the shoals of God depending
but when i listen inside myself
all i hear is water on rocks
and sometimes
at a movie people near
me are crying and
i wonder what happened
to them that didn’t
happen to me
but now i’m thinking maybe
it’s all like snow falling
in a warm climate
that you have to accept
how little of it there is
that you have to know
where to look
freud watches birds
in the beginning
is a black leather couch neat as a cake of seeds
and a man in a dark gray jacket skating
his rolling chair back and forth on a square of plastic that covers the rug
the man stays in his chair behind his desk out of view
of the person who lies on the couch facing the window
in the beginning are the words
spoken by that patient on the couch
they fly up like birds
and bump into the glass of the window
see goldfinches and titmice in the branches outside
and begin to sing to their uncaged brethren
while the doctor – my father – notes down the outdoor species
checking his Birds of North America guide
by now the patient has hatched an entire flock
cedar waxwing fantasies, black crow night terrors
and all the sparrows and magpies
of ordinary irritation
in a kaleidoscope of wings they crowd each other at the ceiling
while my father says yes yes go on
finally the desk clock trembles from the 49th to the 50th minute
and the session is concluded for the day
the patient stands up and opens the office door
and a raucous cone of birds streams after him
as if my father had handed him the strings
to an enormous bundle of balloons
our dead
of course we don’t really want them back
would stare tongue-tied and throat-choked if
they materialized reconstituting
themselves from the dust and scraps unburied
in our closets to stand in
toe-tapping hip-handed annoyance with
our muddling on, our insufficient mourning
ever ready to restart the argument
with the jumper cables of family rage
no no we say
we’re good we’ve got this we’ve missed you
as much as we were able and now
these martinis are for us alone
their windex taste of solitude bites
our tongues and we’ve made new dents
in all the upholstered places
when we see your face it’s only in our snapshots
in little dreams that we forget by our first coffee
and in the phones that we fish out of our pockets to tell you
some luscious bit of gossip and then sheepishly hit
end call
doritt carroll
Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, DC. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Main Street Rag, North American Review, Coal City Review, Eunoia Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Gargoyle, Nimrod, and Cherry Tree, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
