40th Anniversary Feature: SCARECROW, BLACK TULIP, THYME

By ARIANA-SOPHIA KARTSONI
BWR Genre Editor, Fiction, 1997-1998

I have loved you as time searched for its wristwatch
and several hours rushed over the hill or was it years
while the loss cost us all.  I meant to say the lost
(or was it lust) cut us all. In any case, I am tired
Misters, of all this losing. I woke with song
behind my teeth but to sing it is to strain it.
Sometimes it’s bearable, or Wednesday, you choose.
I rotate my tires just in case of rapture–or raptors.
Every universe is not universal, the stars are barstools,
and most nights sit up, elbows angled, leathery, yellow-eyed
spinning and falling off. Here and there glimpses of the pets
of extinct giants, the sidewalk: a dachshund’s spine;
love has gone that way, simply prehistoric, the sea
turns to tomato soup, biblical.
I am stuffed with good ideas, which is why
you’re nowhere to be found inside me.
Understand, I have been blued, untrued,
bibled and reviled, it grows old, I grow
petunias, oregano, daisies. Tarragon so prolific
it scares the lesser spices, Sunflower-until
one day I woke up
to the vastness, the handful
of days dashing over the hillside
like the children of nursery rhymes.
to remain unculled, uncolored
and (for all the poems,) unsung.

Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design and serves as faculty advisor to Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine. She is awaiting a chapbook from Dreamhorse Press, another, Aloha, Vaudeville Doll by Dancing Girl Press and her second full-length colllection: The Rub by Elixir Press. She is author of a previous collection: Intaglio, published in 2006 by Kent State University Press. She currently lives in Powell, Ohio with a dreamy man, a canoe full of cats and frogs and a hibiscus that when in bloom with its dinnerplate blossoms reminds her fondly of her days in Tuscaloosa and the first time she saw both magnoilias and fireflies, served as fiction editor for BWR, lived on Riverside Drive and watched cockroaches grow to the size of matchbox cars.

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