By Rebbecca Brown
The know is a tyrant. A temper tantrum. A stride that is a stomp. A two step. A four. A perfectly manicured lawn. An end game. A booby trap. A blister. A clench. A fist. A furthering. It is progress.
The know knock knocked on my door and I should have known who’s there.
The no makes the know no better than that. The no sidles along. Whispers. Sometimes laughs and limits. The no makes the know no how.
The no puts perspective in a prism or a prison refracts. Says there are two sides, evenly negated. The no is a blooming proposition. It is active, compressed, in between splinters lies a nest of mites. Give me no to give me bliss.
Now, all deciding. Hand shakes and tree tumble. Seasons. Breath and breath and breath. Skulls not as thick as one might guess. Lots of ions hot as irons, dancing between sunken in chests. Thrumming still as static sparking from a nightgown. The birds may be silent, their beaks all closed, waiting while their hearts beat tiny little earth quakes.
Ok, she said. Ok. Know now. No. Ok. Can you see it?
O, the grass grows despite the heat charring the deserts in westerly places. O, the sky turns grey, and then blue again, and drops things, either metal or water or belief in the rays filtered through the clouds that look so magnetic. O, the weeds take over the fields and push the little roots that send signs as if speaking. O, we love, O, we love, O, there’s no other O like the O when our mouths, surprised, kiss the minutes now forever.
Rebbecca Brown’s debut novel They Become Her received an Honorable Mention in the 2009-2010 Starcherone Innovative Fiction Contest and was published in 2014 by What Books Press. In the past, she received an Honorable Mention from the Academy of American Poets, the Timothy Adams award for creative writing, the Rachel Sherwood Prize for Poetry and First Place in the LACC Writing Contest for Creative Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in print and online journals such as American Literary Review, Confrontation, Requited, H_ngm_n, 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry and Ekleksographia (among others). A former Fulbright-Nehru Lecturer, she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at WKU.