Read More: A brief Q&A with Claire Scott
Stories Don’t Always Stand Straight
The film director, editing, cutting, redacting,
renouncing. What’s left on the floor we never
see. What’s spliced in looks almost seamless.
Yet sometimes we discover disturbing gaps:
a fear of orange, nausea at the smell of leather.
Clips of history on the cutting floor.
Maybe an uncle in flashy shirt. Maybe driving a brand
new Cadillac, stopping on a secluded road by an old mine shaft.
Turning to touch a child.
Or the story’s smooth but makes no sense.
How could a mother have played princess dolls, baked cookies,
when she stayed in bed all day, pills by her side.
The screen writer searches for language to wrap
the marrow. Always aiming, mostly missing, like my son
speaking French or my sister explaining black holes.
The story gallops ahead, skipping age six, age seventeen.
Or limps behind, hesitant, not wanting to catch up to
the husband, the black eyes, the stiches, the shelter.
I watch the film and listen to the lines, to the words.
Always aiming, mostly missing. I can see words won’t work.
Let the silence between the words tell the story.
Not Exactly Genesis
That was not the day I killed him.
That day he was sprawled in the shade,
swigging a six pack, while I pulled apples off
the Tree to bake a crisp or maybe a cobbler,
hauling wood, building a fire, sweat streaming
between my breasts. What is the point of this
good for nothing, this carbon copy of God
who thinks every day is the Seventh Day?
I found comfort in the snake, an astute philosopher
reduced to belly crawling and dust eating
by a spiteful God. He is a Platonist, believing
Forms float in perfection beyond time and space.
Snake Apple Garden
As for me, I prefer the earthy pragmatism
of Aristotle, the slightly burnt crust
of an apple pie.
It was the next day I killed him.
The snake donated the poison, pleased
to be rid of this adolescent fool. I strode
out of the garden with my lapsarian pal
curled around my shoulders like a satin stole.
You can find us on Thursday nights at Adam’s Rib,
still arguing like an old married couple
as we sip salt-rimmed Margaritas.
Forms are abstract, eternal, only knowable
through the mind, insists the snake.
But I know better.
His body was perfectly concrete.
Trace Fossils
“…the sign left in the rock record
by the impress of life rather than life itself”
– Underland by Robert Macfarlane
A dinosaur footprint, eggshells, nests, tooth marks,
tracks, trails all point to life that once was
but left long ago, leaving a pale echo
The heel bruised steps to your writing room
the dent in the cushion on your reading chair
The Splendid and the Vile open to page 327
a scrabble of books scattered on the floor
the tube of Tom’s squeezed from the middle
your boots and sneakers a-jumble in the hall
the memory of your hands on my body
the stick and sweat, the spike of shiver
I touch the chair, the books, the toothpaste
run fingers over my breasts
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Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review, Enizagam and Healing Muse among others. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Claire Scott