Nancy Flynn
I never set out to intentionally “dis” obedience. For me, questioning authority became the sine qua non of trying to “make sense” after coming of age in the 1960s. My chosen medium was the word. One word led to another: many questions, rarely answers. Now it’s much later in the day and…
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Faced with a Towering Stack of Rubbermaid Bins, the Lifelong Incunabulist Contemplates (Yet Again) How Best to Deal with Four Decades of Notebooks that Require Destruction before the (Inevitable) End
Obviously, there have been too few
bonfires
in my life. So much to cinder,
volumes to blacken a sky!
Think: miles. Think: underbelly & lost
-to-the-naked-eye clouds.
This me fussing about proof,
debating the evidence—yes or no?—
to flame. By now,
I ought to be second-degree,
bloody blister,
resident in a sisterhood of ooze.
For forever, it seemed easier:
seal the secrets, wait for their all
to pall.
When did it grow unbearable
to track the wagon
trains of worded bliss,
my any attempt at record
stacked in color-coded
coffins made from purloined oil
& trucked across the American steppes?
Call me one smoking mess of crazy, call me
kindled & caught. For kindling seeks fire
& every Tuesday’s offering
has its jake brake to remind: roll
the recyclables cart you could fill with
a paper logjam
to the curb.
The mere trick may be
getting each match to ignite
then leap—past the late
Middle English: bone + fire.
See, I was never a pot/brush/scarlet-
orange persimmon with a cattail or a cat.
Or a room without a clock, a glass door
into the handily smashed,
the housebroken in.
My marrow: self
-deprecation eager to end up
calcified salt in a potter’s field.
Where the non
sequiturs fill a burn
barrel with regret.
After all
the chatter, the talk.
Think: a piddling. Think: conflagration
upon sun.
One
folio
of boneyard
daffodils
pushing up.
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Nancy Flynn grew up on the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, spent many years on a downtown creek in Ithaca, New York, and now lives near the mighty Columbia in Portland, Oregon. She attended Oberlin College, Cornell University, and has an M.A. in English from SUNY/Binghamton. Her writing has received an Oregon Literary Fellowship and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. Poetry chapbooks include The Hours of Us (2007) and Eternity a Coal’s Throw (2012); her book-length collection, Every Door Recklessly Ajar, was published by Cayuga Lake Books in June 2015. Her website is www.nancyflynn.com.