Issue 4: November 2003

David L Briggs | Carrie Etter | Roddy Lumsden | Liane Strauss | Frances Williams

CARRIE ETTER

The Cult of the Eye

Then I glanced over the treetops, the miles of pasture
the window shows me again and again,
and soon I began to believe the window;
I became a votary in the cult of the eye and the cult
of transparency, because after we spoke
I used a form of to be as an equal sign: you were transparent.
I gleefully forbore the skepticism of seemed.

Admittedly, I nearly said you appeared transparent,
but I put my ear to the window's mantra
and asseverated your sincerity without reserve.
If this is a love poem, that's because I'm ready to love everybody.
I'll gaze on the miles of pasture as the sun descends
and never think I must kneel in the dampening grass;
and you'll refrain, just for now, from remarking my naiveté.

The Daughters of Prospero

When gales make a house a boat to toss on water,
And Gonzalo scrutinizes me, says I'm ripe

For hanging, and loquaciously heads below deck,
I know this isn't the oceanic feeling

Freud wrote of, this lingering image of a child
Placing paper boat after boat onto a brook,

Though each one drowns in a short drop ten feet downstream.
Placing white boat after boat onto a brook,

Because she has learned beginner's origami,
Because her fingers have amassed a score of cuts,

Because some of the boats never looked seaworthy,
Because a surprising number can glide like swans,

The girl sets her boats on a fatal course, and though
Her head is bent, I can just see her eyes' fierce gleam.

'The Cult of the Eye' first published in Poetry Review, Winter 2002/2003
'The Daughters of Prospero' first published in The Times Literary Supplement, 14 February 2003

Carrie Etter moved to London from southern California in 2001. In the UK, her poems have appeared in Metre, Poetry Wales, Poetry Review, Reactions, Thumbscrew, The Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. As a visiting lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire for 2003-4, she is teaching modules in short-story writing and literature. She collects masks, detests spiders, and does not believe in past lives.