I can conjure your voice like a ventriloquist with the chords of my brain
-throat: before there was the internet—radio-stereos only played tapes.
We’re a tape in the glove compartment, we always were
even though I didn’t know it when I’d say: what did three bars on an
empty blue-collar stomach do? Your eyes—two warped skipping records.
Somebody might buy your car, even with the passenger side smashed in,
the car we drove
from Kansas
to Wisconsin
to California, and on their way back find a mix-tape.
Your funeral, your death that has not happened, yet,
but has happened, to me, makes you a ghost I can contact:
You are a face down
picture frame, still hanging—the paint on my walls, and I am
the shadow stomping, the fly on your cheek while you sleep.
Paige m Blair
Paige m Blair exuberantly pursues an M.F.A. in poetry at Florida State University. She appreciates the subtle inexactness of Illinois cornfields and Florida’s year-round warmth. In 2009, The University of Kansas granted her a B.G.S. in American Studies and English. In 2007, she sailed around the world on Semester at Sea. In previous lives she taught kindergarten in Seoul, South Korea, and creative writing to female inmates at the Douglas County Jail. Her work has appeared in The Coal City Review, The Deadline-Chicago, and KIOSK. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor of The Southeast Review, and was, at one point, the editor-in-chief of Women of Colour, and Comma, Splice—small journals out of Lawrence, Kansas. She is currently interested in identity performance, the avant-garde, and drinking more coffee.
Photo: Noel Kerns, “Farm de Ville”
Website: http://www.noelkernsphotography.com
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