Sunday, February 9, 2014

First Word: Larissa Higgins: Spaghetti

Lies and nested lies and lives, tangling  as you're pushing to remember what you said, and which lie, when, what will offend today, and what it was you had to say last time, and which new flight of fancy needs fair winds for launching to keep up -
            They lie there, coiled, mounting on the plate, malevolence and an oily need to please the sauce - if we wish to push the metaphor until it squeaks.
            No, malevolent obstruction, that's the starch, the gum that binds the tangled strings of would not, should not, why, and must you? And the clincher - won't.  

            Over that, remembering, sauce slides, pink-cheeked and plump and tender-eyed, oozing in the wrinkles at the corners of the mouth and lie by lie, and lie by frown and smile and manufactured sigh - the mountain moves.       
            And dirty fingers afterward leave stains. Where we perforce must wipe 'em on our laps.