26 June 2010

Featured Poet: Laura Goldstein

pay/phone




Put your money where your mouth is. Please. Place your jewelry on the table before you leave. I’ll give you a ring. Just before dawn, a dinosaur roared and a call rang out across the land.








Push here to be cut off immediately. When we were speaking we were disconnected inevitably because of the way that we bounce off of towers on our way down to the ground. Even if we part, I know I’ll always be in your phone.






Soon talking to you will be an emergency, on the order of red flashing lights somehow reaching out soft on the mushrooms on the forest floor. More retreat to a warmer light. No keypad close to code your cue.






The receiver is not usually thought of as a weapon but when in bed it should be just in reach and easily the heaviest thing in the room.






How the shifts in zip codes sound with your mouth wrapped around the round end of a company phone. You’re tapping out someone’s dinner reservations from your home phone on off hours. How our silverware sounds when set down.






Do you tend to short-change conversations that lose the war with the cord? And we fold into a sort of norm when unaware, talking up a storm.






A quarter of some monologue in monotone slips out of a slot called “old coins” A handful of numbers, a wealth of wires, a simple recording, a graduated tone







Copyright © 2010 Laura Goldstein