24 Poems ~ 24 Hours
Chloe Forsting is 21 and lives in Louisville, Kentucky. She pursues poetry mostly as a solitary act and steals frequently from other poets to offset her perceived or actual shortcomings. She was inducted into poetry by her high school English teacher when he made the class read The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Things have more or less gone from there. She still likes T.S. Eliot in spite of his own shortcomings.
The heart beats in a fish as it does in humans.
The muscle that lets us toss the line
also keeps the fish alive.
The river has a pulse, but no heart.
The fish doesn’t mind.
Neither do we.
The goal is to work with the pulse
and overcome the fish’s beating heart,
tugging at each opportunity to stay
living, breathing, staring, ugly.
After hours the soft moonlight slips
along the crack of the doors, the windows
are illuminated like the back of a
movie theater screen, and the witches
step out, throw themselves from
rooftops on broomsticks. Some lay low,
preferring not to cast a silhouette on
the moon–hedge witches are quieter
than their kin, those who converge
into parties. Call them covens or not,
they’ll still weave their craft and toss
it across the sleeping village, spells
like nets to catch the nightmares
rampaging in the brains of those
who slumber restlessly tonight.
The moon is full. The hours slip,
and the witches assume their posts.
The diagrams are laid out, the bottles
emptied, the incantations practiced.
They work at night to keep from
being seen, suspected, blamed
for the latest life upending–yet here
they are, tonight, the fingers twining
invisible nets together, perhaps a
spark or glow as a note that work
is, indeed, being done–this is
a quiet thing, no drama, no explosions
in the village square, no explusion
all at once of dark dreams from brains
turning to mush in full moonlight,
less ritual, more programming. And
when they cannot stay awake,
even the witches resign to try again
another night soon, tell each other
“good morning,” fly back to their beds,
let day pass over their sleeping faces.
There is a coursing wave throughout
the fine parts of my frame, where
the fish schools come to investigate
the mystery of my death. They don’t
make much of it anymore–they are
used to the sight of rotted bones
after millennia of foreign beings
crashing through the firmament which
separates their world from mine.
If I can call it my world anymore.
I was built on dry land but born
in salt waters, and if I had not sunk
into craggy depths, I would have crumbled
into pieces on the same kind of mass that
allowed me an existence at all.
And anyway, I have lain here for centuries,
so shouldn’t I be calling the ocean
floor home to my soggy body?
My name is Chloe. I live in Louisville, Kentucky, which you probably know as the home of the Derby or Hunter S. Thompson. If you didn’t, now you do.
I’m a Capricorn. If you don’t believe in astrology, I was born on January 1st. If you don’t believe in birthdays, I’m 21 years old. If you believe that age is just a number, then we can’t be friends.
I recently graduated with a B.A. in English from Berea College, which was a deeply formative period of my life where I discovered incredible things about myself, awful things about the world, and okay things about other people. It was very important and I never want to do it again.
I’ve been writing poetry seriously, though not necessarily well, since my senior year of high school. I take a symbolist/imagist approach to the stuff, and I want to concentrate more on form. People tell me I do poetry well. I don’t believe them, because believing them means I’m satisfied, which means I’m done with poetry.
I like Radiohead, judging people by their clothes, collecting handsome paperbacks, and hot beverages. I dislike hedonism, corruption, 99% of slam poetry, and expensive health food stores.