Here at Black Lawrence Press we are celebrating National Poetry Month with a poem a day, featuring a total of 30 authors from our list. Today’s featured poet is B.C. Edwards, author of the short story collection The Aversive Clause and the forthcoming poetry collection From the Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes.
No. 647.
To clean Oily or Greasy Bottles.
The two of us, we drank the strangest things.
Warped glass angled the world to its most abstract
so we couldn’t tell if it was us or the wine or what.
We smoked and watched
smoke drift through the loosened cork.
Stoned and imagined we had a tiny house inside
our wine bottle, bobbing behind glass
floating, sitting at the top of a lost scrap of paper
curled and left by the stranded on the stranded’s little island.
“Darling,” the note would say or
“Help,” the note would say or
“When they asked me what album I would have with me on an island
I said Radiohead’s OK Computer and now
I’ve got only this one piece of vinyl, that’s all I’ve got.
I can’t even eat it because it is so precious and
I don’t know what else
I’m supposed to do.” or “My island is too fucking small
and there are too many sharks and I don’t have anything to kiss.”
And our house would do well there, inside the bottle.
We would have a garden or something.
Lie on the lawn of the glass, stare at the green brown sun
until one day bored and stoned we would push
at the cork at the edge of our world,
curious as to the universe outside
unhappy with just questions,
and in doing so let the world inrush around
fill our house with salt
drown out the note on the scrap
and go down you, me
all of our convictions
even the ones made up just then, on the spot,
and also take with us the only thing in the world
left of the stranded.
B.C. Edwards‘ work has appeared in Mathematics Magazine, Hobart, The New York Times, and others. His debut collection, The Aversive Clause, was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Prize, a finalist for the Sherwood Anderson Fiction Prize and winner of the 2011 Hudson Prize. His debut collection of poetry, From The Standard Cyclopedia of Recipes, is due out this year from Black Lawrence Press. He attended the graduate writing program at The New School in New York and lives in Brooklyn.
