Three Poems
THE LETTER Y AND OTHER LETTERS
What is the letter W all about
What is the letter Y all about
What is the beverage Red Bull all about
What is a pink sofa cushion all about
What is this town this city this apartment all about
Can I have twelve dollars? No. Y get in the out
Y get in an accident.
Y get in a car. What on your helicopter home. What mount.
What the letters R.
Re cash: where there’s a will there’s a Y.
Where there’s a Y there’s a burning tree
What could a letter possibly
Say about the STATES OF MATTER
GAS
LIQUID
ELECTRIC
What could an alphabet do to me
If I stand still enough
If I position my feet according to some law
If I make the capital letters CAPITAL LETTERS if I seem to be going forwards
Am I really going uptown
To visit so and so in the hospital again
The hospital slash the future
Where so and so lives in the capital of tubes
where so and so slash U
And if I write VERY EFFUSIVELY
I may see what U are all about
Are U about the round donut of the law
Are U about tubes to send fish in
Are U about R U about not being able NOT B-ING able to see
Over the tops of roofs and branches
To look alive at “the end of the anthropoCne”
To C only alphabets, ladders
Staying still in the sky like tiny caves
Where what lives in me
Small impulses of power
What am I doing while my friends are in the hospital
Making lowercase letters capital letters finger guns
Going on the internet
Looking up pictures of thousand year old slime
In one thousand years if I am still alive
Will I B the letter I
In my underwear
In a field of medium sized rocks
Writing to the future of me
Dear future of me
What am I doing
As people I love are sick and dying
Taking apart the electrical grid
Taking in films about the letters
Which letters Obviously
Y
WHAT TO DO ABOUT BIRDS
I took a walk into the “formulated world.” I took a walk into the “non google drive world.” I took a walk into the “say something nostalgic world” and who should I find there but you, stock-still in my glass of water gazing up at me. You looked like an isosceles triangle. You looked like a baby duck. You stared up at me with your face full of grass. You looked at me with such force. Can anybody can stay in place the way a chamber can? I do not want that bonfire, I am not stuck with anything, I cannot go almost anywhere, I wish the snowmobiles would find me. I took a walk into the “formulated world.” The weather outside was a great pumpkin. Engorged. Orange. I wanted to be known differently by you than the shape she sometimes drew of me in her water glass. Always a body, mine or not, in the glass. For instance I said draw me on the light purple paper. And so became a draft-clung curtain, who double-picked the thumb-side skin, dug parachutes where five hatchlings fell from their apartment. Their apartment being a nest at the park. The hatchlings being barn swallows, and used to this. So I took a walk in the “sunshine world.” In the say “something useful world.” In the “never gonna subtweet my real enemies world.” My real enemies being people who do not belong to the world. So I being insane about my enemies, in calling them that, except that they are shapes drawn on my body. Shapes drawn on me in the shapes of other places. Once I took, I must have taken, a walk down the snowmobile route, past the spot where the big machines sleep, pleading for water or release. Nearly everything is cold, but it’s been out here for so long, getting roughed in the regular air.
STUDY TO BE HELD IN ANY CONTAINER
instead the groceries
light up my mouth
little iridescent fish
study to get over
the verbiage of the house
it is confirmed at least
that I am not haunted
myself am not certain
of the wall-sized fish
getting left off by me
& mine aware now however
of the stratagem employed
here making me “hinge
of the door girl” getting by
on rain or mud or dogs
or logs a certain survival
is in order through
the house it’s the only
type of food for lunch
after lunch the happiest
unhauntable would have
to be the car study to
get sick to get upset
when the soft tissues
of the mind are at stake
you have to step to it
study to kick over
the branches the mud the pond
a rock flung up a listen
to this and this my limb
my food for lunch my
muscling the car
the kite goes in
the sky, up up it goes no
reason but I screw with you
it really goes in me
and out of me after like
white kitchen string
Nora Claire Miller
is a poet from New York City. Nora’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart, Tagvverk, The Brooklyn Review, APARTMENT, Pulpmouth, and elsewhere. Nora's chapbook, LULL (2020) was the winner of the 2019 Ghost Proposal Chapbook contest. Nora earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Twitter: @cicadafromhell