Jane L. Carman

December 2013

Jane L. Carman is the founder of the Festival of Language and codirector of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University where she received her Ph.D. and is a former Sutherland Fellow. She prefers writing that takes in genreless breaths and lives by rules that continuously morph into the unfamiliar. Her work can be found in Devil’s Lake, Santa Clara Review, Mixed Fruit, JAC, eilmae, Pequin,580-Split, American Book Review, Dirty, Dirty (Jaded Ibis Productions 2013), among others and is forthcoming in Palooka.

 

Festival of Language events: 2009 Chicago AWP; 2012 Denver AWP; 2011 DC AWP; 2012 Chicago AWP; 2013 Boston AWP; 2013 Lansing SSML; 2013 Milwaukee M/MLA; 2014 Seattle AWP

A reading eXperiment events: 2013 Boston AWP

Mad World

 

 

faces of strangers, faces of friends, of foes close in, pass through her, featureless orbs in orbit, then nothing, then in orbit again—epigraph

 

 

she dreams herself in a short    red car          rims metallic in the sun rolling backwards the scene rushing forward to the sounds of lynard skynard                  ye ll ow gr ay  da sh li n es c on ne ct                            this baby can handle a turn     baby can handle      a turn      baby           can

 she reaches a flat-a-way the odometer can’t keep up   shes rolling running rushing               into         a tree  or telephone pole  or brick building    her head pressed against broken glass   blood spilling        or only         dripping onto the pavement or in the crow-vetch-lined ditch tickling and trickling into the open mouths of lilies

 

she dreams herself wrapped in the arms of a harness  atop a tree-matted cliff or atop a needled pine     an eagle passing above or she is the eagle   the scent of pine   musk of a fox  smack of the river floating up as she rushes toward the water and snaps back to be near or to be the eagle   then

                               down  and to the clifftop  the hardrock side and little survivor trees a blur  and back down and a snap  but this time she’s swimming  toward the blue               but not of the sky         she is            swimming so fast that the voices cannot find their way     in

 

she dreams herself in a business suit and pencil skirt  in a suite tapping a laptop calling home to two daughters           blonde curls around pink faces     and a steroid-enhanced rugged husband perpetually five-o-clock-shadowed and  they love her and miss her  already  and    the husband laughs that they should make more children  and she can tell      she can smell something in the background at the backside of the screen    back of the scene   an uneasy presence    she can taste sulfur in the thundersounds   and she says the words love and miss and soon and love and there is a silence  the humidity of sin  frizzing the curls        staining the blonde

 

never having dreamed

never trusting a dream

she doesn’t dream

doesn’t believe in dreams

 

she dreams herself a rock goddess on a rock stage    pyrotechnics        exploding behind on every side              surrounding her in   sparkling flames and fumes   she’s a caged tiger   pawing out reaching toward the  sea of waves the sea of hands and feature-free orbs              when she reaches closer  they                           lunge    forward    foreign and familiar     the stage caves in      fading flames lighting up glints of metal    glimpses of smoking synthetics  snapshots of nothing    before she feels the weight of some thing pressing against her breast  tightening with each exhale  movingincloser                                        deeper                 deeper                                                                                                                 deeper

 

she dreams herself   facedown sunblasted in a desert   an oasis swimming yards away  her limp legs twist backwards her arms crossed under her chest beneath her holding a rose or cactus or lucky hare’s foot                     the oasis crowd is wild    stigmas and stamen swaying     she sees the curves of their bodies dancing or loving or convulsing in death     the long waves of their hair    their faces sunbright and indistinguishable  they gaze at her with empty sockets and continue to groove and grind on heatwaves             drinking umbrellaed glasses of blue                                                                                                                                                                                the oasis floating                                                          away

 

never having dreamed

she doesn’t dream

doesn’t trust dreams

doesn’t believe

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1:1 December 2013

Bill Yarrow

Thaddeus Rutkowski

Jeannie E. Roberts

AE Reiff

Ndaba Sibanda

Jane L. Carman