Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in East Texas.  Her poems have appeared in Acornwhistle, Borderlands, Passager, Prairie Dog, Ankhology, Maverick and on line at 2 River View, Unlikely Stories, Perihelion, The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner, Isibongo , Conspire, Tintern Abbey, A Writer's Choice &  upcoming in Zuzu’s Petals. She has won The Lipscomb Award from Centenary College, a Passager Poetry Contest Award, placed in Suite 101's Poetry Month Contest and has been three times nominated a Pushcart Prize.  She has a new chapbook, Reading Berryman to the Dog, and her work appears in Athens Avenue: A Collection of Poetry (Funky Dog Publishing, 1999). 

Burying the Body
for p.g.

March is not that hot, but we hurried it
into the ground in Arkansas
where the bereaved don’t need an undertaker

if they plant the corpse in twenty-four hours.
We were quick—
washed the body, dressed it, slivered it—

so thin by then—into the pine box made
by his friends, buried it
in the chapel graveyard for a formal note

then looked away while his red-haired son
danced on the grave.
The kid was strung taut like all of us.

We said that. We sighed. We remembered
good times, bad, believed most
in the good we remembered, not in the last

days, sweating, tossing, afraid to die,
even after cancer claimed the whole shebang.
Then home at last, we watched for foxes coming

for the chickens, started spring planting,
studied our own boys, but only slyly
only with the edges of our eyes.

Proportions
“how big they are, the living.” Naomi Shihab Nye

The Dead tuck themselves into our ears. They whisper, “There ,there.”
in their small voices. They never say where.

Chill is nothing to the Dead. They fit their cold bellies against our
backs.
If we shiver, they press closer.

The Dead flit through our kitchen screens. They take the place of gnats
on the patio. They bite our white elbows.

On the fourth of July, the Dead displace fireworks. Some explode
like landmines. Then millions, disguised as stars, dance on a pinhead.

The Dead wait, humming like electricity inside our thirteen inch TVs.
Bad jokes pour out of them. A tinny laugh track prompts us to join in.

Our bulk of never overwhelms the Dead. They are sure of themselves.
They know the living are small enough.

In the Nervous Hospital

three days of skewed reality.
The susurrations of the nurses, thigh on thigh,
white stockings blinding
in the halls, as Nightingales slipped by
with drugs, with meals. Terror

was the secret food she fed herself,
ignored their trays, the creaking pipes. Now fixed

against that old confusion, the cure’s
a numb condition in which the ordinary other
survives by circumspection,
gets through the everyday needle’s eye, balances
a mnemonic trance of ducts & hypodermics,

that history, against a relief of breeze,
a red flash in the barn rafters,
she names cardinal.

The Girl With Cracked Lips Speaks

out
years ago meeting a lover
tulips & hydrangea
his story, hers
stamen and pistil, just-awake
wasps, years ago
in the dark, the Black
Label, baby
the emotion lotion
Speaks up
under a parabola of birds,
of parakeets flying like sparrows
in the sphere of the smaller wrens

Speaks on force
majeure
tells how the female cat
must battle
before she can ovulate
in this it is important
both not to lie
and to appear not to

Says to the other lily,
lily
speak to your pillow
as if it were your equal
or only yourself
listening
this makes you
want to do
do this
Speak

X Files

It’s taken time but I really like his looks—
the guy from X files with the cheekbones—
and I’m watching the episode where this schmuck
with a chubby face and a nondescript body
has fathered children by five different women
and scored because he could change his looks
by controlling some subcutaneous layer of muscle—
implausible but enticing. He can shapeshift
into anyone, really. So he chooses the guy
with the Russian cheekbones, who I really like looking at
now after four years or so of seeing his face
each week and on reruns
and who I know will catch this mutant creep
eventually
and I think about all of us watching
how we root for the unlikely hero and move our eyebrows
up or down, suck in our chops and purse our lips.
How we work to morph into some perfect approximation
of Eastern European bones or those wet bee-stung
mouths that are so popular now.
And I think trying to be someone else is all
about what you’re used to, what you see each week
and every afternoon in syndication. What sells
fried chicken and I decide it’s all about nothing
nothing but controlling
that layer of muscle just under the skin.

I Want To Die Like Billy Williams,
Walking Myself Home From The Hospital
for David

“If I go first, don’t race to follow. Don’t hurry
off!” you say, as if you knew I’d be impatient.
As I was on vacations, on those duty visits to parents,
bent, we believed, on outlasting us, their progeny.
“If they can’t take it to the grave, they’ll stay
here. They won’t go,” we joked and were appalled
when, dead, they left it all. Now we’re the old
folks who anticipate the heavenly

rummage sale. “Survive!” you say,
supposing that I’d be bereft, alone. “Enjoy
life!” I pretend, as usual, you’re right, that I’d
be suicidal in the ache of days that followed
you, not ever say that though it chokes me to inhale
the forlorn dust you leave behind, I gladly will.

Seasonal Losses

Last summer’s weathered hay,
splash of tires on blacktop, and fall rain
shingles off an umbrella, weeps
from the cupola, makes a cool counterpoint
to the zealous blooming in the head, cancer
that sets the milk carton on a lit stove,
shuffles into the garden
naked as a rosebush. The dead

in fall. Their absolute numbers
heavier than I thought, than leaves piled
against the fence, their particular faces
reduced to one skeletal face where
gravity pares away all
that was supple, extra. Until their passing
required only someone to sit
and watch the scant twist of flesh
from which inclination departs.

Driving into the fast-growing tumor
of the city where winter rye sprouts
in sidewalk cracks and the wind brews
a quick explosion of chill,
shucked knees and elbows. Behind me,
under remaindered dirt, beyond recognition,
all that’s left of fall, the damaged
stone, the austere moons of their nails.

The Child

The tropics, the palm trees, pigs, the sty, the stick, the meanness, the
running. The horses, the broad backs, sun, the plant rows, the plow, the
sweating. The old man, the stale smell, tobacco-stains, the coffee can,
the
spitting. The pine trees, the gravel drive, not looking back, the
panting.
The fear, the buried vein, twisted guts, the running. The peeled knees,
the
rich trickle, surprise, the ending. The should be, the really is,
childhood, the hard edge, the sweating. The going on. The child. The
slow
forgetting.