Spring 2012, Volume 12

Poetry by Kit Frick

Sea of Crises

Contrary to its ominous name, “Mare Crisium” is one of the better-preserved maria, its borders intact and its floor largely smooth and unworried.

 

You must destroy the infrastructure. For a job of this magnitude, a wrecking ball is best. Have your wits about you. Have a well-cultivated rage. This is no small undertaking. This is the whole of it, the demolition hour. You can’t complete the job alone. Pound the pavement, incite. Distribute weaponry: high reach excavators, hydraulic hammers, hydraulic shears. TNT, detonating cord, C4. Can you smell it? Blood on the wind.

You come around in an auto shop. The air smells of grease and repair. You clutch pamphlets in your fist. They warn of the end of days. You gather your wits about you. You must remember how home feels. You must leave the shop, soundless.

Lake of Dreams

“Lacus Somniorum,” notable for its irregularly defined borders and a proclivity toward overanalysis.

 

You are running toward the staircase when the stairs become a cliff. Allow momentum. Allow airborne, then falling. Grab the vine, Tarzan style. Allow the swing to save you. You wake up in a restaurant. You can’t eat enough bread. The server brings basket after basket. There is something you must tell your mother, but what. You must not neglect her in her pregnancy. You wake up in a hotel room. You must pack, but there is cat piss on your luggage. Your best navy suitcase. Attempt to conjure. A past time or place. The smell of home baked bread. The swift fright of losing ground. You wake up in a garage. You wake up on the D train. You wake up on a fault line. You wake up in a fjord. In the Taj Mahal. In North Dakota. On The Weather Channel.

 

 

 

BIO: Kit Frick is currently Poetry Editor for Salt Hill and is an Associate Editor for Black Lawrence Press, where she edits the small press newsletter Sapling. Her poems have recently or will soon appear in places like DIAGRAM, CutBank, PANK, Conduit, Jellyfish, and H_NGM_N.