Lindsay Marianna Walker is a Ph.D. candidate at the Center for Writers in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. A finalist for the 2009 Walt Whitman Award for her manuscript, *the Josephine letters*, she has served as Poetry Editor for the literary journal, *Juked*, since 2005. Her poems are recent or forthcoming, in: *The African American Review, Valley Voices, West Branch, *and other journals. She has published several stories, essays, and plays, and in 2009 she won the Center for Writers Joan Johnson Award for Fiction.

Two Poems (May 20, 2010. Issue 17.)

Telescope Head Trips the Lights Fantastic

Dear Newton,
My lover can uncrack eggs and promises
there’s no such thing as being alone.
He tells me need gives us identity,
asks to brush my hair. Is there no end
to his useful advances?

Dear Josephine,
You are full of faulty
reflections, you lack
a light.

Dear Newton,
Lately, I don’t wear anything
under my blazer. The voice in my head
calls for loud music, red gum,
sex at the oddest hours. Will the moon
always have such a dramatic effect
on my pants?

Dear Josephine,
It is a circle of confusion.
You are not really suffering.

Dear Newton,
Could I be the kind of planet
that holds a better one inside?

Dear Josephine,
If you’re counting planets
and two look like one—
you’ve blown it.

Four Pages of Nice Things

Verona, November 1796

Josephine,
In truth I’m worried, dear friend, not to have received word from you.
Quickly, write me four pages of nice things to fill my heart
with sentiment and pleasure.

1.
Sasha had her kittens yesterday.
It was indeed the yellow skulking tom.

She’s hidden them inside the walls and has lost interest
in the kitchen crickets that come in from the alley

(not that there have been many).
It reminds me of that story you tell about your sister

hiding under the bathroom sink for hours, sobbing.
You still don’t know why?

2.
Tonight you decide
whether to pawn the fog machine
or sell your ferocious plasma, For the campaign.

I’d like to buy you a new hat. Something knit
and floppy and yellow. I’d like to make you

a mixed tape. I’d like cassettes again
to be in fashion. I’d like to lend
you a Walkman and an hour
of roads. I’d like to know

you would sit still
if your blood weren’t filled
with tigers.

3.
Look at me, I sat for one whole hour
on the Ferris wheel last week.

The magician tied a red balloon to my wrist
after he finished sticking the knives
into his lovely assistant.

The balloon bobbed like a bean
and in my other hand I held a wand
of French blue cotton candy,
(like mattress ticking)

my little cloud. For one instant
I felt like a good queen.

(If only I’d had someone beside me
in the cart. If only the wheel would
have jammed when I was on top.)

4.
They wouldn’t let me leave
with my balloon and it felt

like watching you go again—
when the magician’s assistant
scissored the string from my wrist.

I never took my eyes off the red dot,
still, somehow, it was lost in all the blue—

the miracle:
the moment
it all disappears.