Issue #29.7 Four Poems by Corwin Ericson
Film History
The legend of the onrushing train and the audience of brave bumpkins that did not flinch and how they glared back and grabbed the caboose and rode to the next showing to find themselves pointing revolvers at an audience bored by their organist who escaped during the ensuing duel carrying the single reel of The Staring Match the audaciously mesmeric film that burned a crater in the screen through which children explored backstage and left the stage door ajar for the cats to slink in and mooch for snipes unsmoked by last night’s audience because they came and went when they wanted like cats looking for warm seats freeing the artists to eschew narrative devices and make work like The Opposing Snowfields with two screens and no projectors which the cats dozed through unaware that most cinemas would burn down before audiences even learned how to applaud.
Last Universal Common Ancestor
Needing bilateral symmetry shoes are parasitic dependent on their hosts to pair them up with their mates.
Bucking the trend the furniture kingdom is unique using legs not for locomotion but to reach the ground.
The illusion of Euclidian flatness allowed tarpits to attract their prey. Parking lots retain this trait belying Einsteinian curvature to lure cars.
Whereas Linnaeus held a shadow is attached umbilically to feet phylogenetic taxonomy hangs it on a branch of the darkness tree.
Consider the carapaces of salt and pepper. Nearly identical yet without any shared ancestry. The desire to be shaken leads to convergence.
Flies evolved good luck to escape hands. Hands assemble into an audience for defense. Clapping makes it hard for performers to perceive individual fingers.
Intelligence thrives on problems concussions rising to the occasions.
Lake of Tears
Boo hoo hoo— the cat cries a lake and the mouse and dog bail out their bathtubs and paddle into the sky. They mop their brows with fistfuls of cloud.
The lake plug is pulled. The duck unfurls her parasol. there’s a cactus here, a mesa there a jailhouse. This is a map that has never been folded. Above it, the bricks zip by and the sun is as round as ever.
The dog shakes off his bath and it all floods again They extend their spyglasses— somewhere there is a dry town with shade trees with rocks for pillows with a good brickyard.
A worm is lowered through the map to explain to the fish the lovelornness of cats the scratchboard nights. The worm tugs twice on the line the dog smokes a cigar, the cat wails the mouse strokes his brick.
Ill-Bricked
I built it so badly that only a few people noticed it was a house. I would squat there in the rain holding bricks over my head.
Later when I was a ghost more people noticed me than before. They were rude. They felt they could say anything to a ghost.
I came to sense I’d lost my night vision and could tell I was losing my night voice and I was deaf to darkness already.
Before I got to this state I would lie in the grass where my house would be impatient for night for ruinous dreams.
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Corwin Ericson is the author of the novel Swell and the collection Checked Out OK. His work has been published in Jubilat, Harper's, Sortes, Galaxy Brain and elsewhere. This summer, to his delight, he discovered that a sentence from his novel appears as an example of usage for the word "shit" in Merriam Webster's online dictionary.
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