literacy
Nora Boxer
read
read one thousand starlings lined up on wires facing the weather
read a sloped shoulder
read diamond patterns beneath her palm in the skull crater the tumor left
read that the asked-for had appeared
read that this was a hard land, a stone land, a man's land, not to be trusted
read water under that
read fear on the water
read faces for opinions
read what wasn't said
read the future in two cracked eggshells at a campsite
read a strange old man in a white fur coat on the wind and then the party was at his house
read happiness in a dream of her father offering a rubber chicken to a boy she disliked
read and misread the ways the earth would open up before her
read power like false water
read limits squaring off into lies
read a fable about love between two women wearing a mask
read that they met each other masked
read how to redirect the hypnotist's mind to the jack of clubs
read waking on a grey sea after unconsciousness
read before like it was after, and after like it was before
read between the
read desire for self behind the electronic selfs
read it had been the harder way walked around a mountain
read circularity as a newer idea of summit or transcendence
read in small recycled moves towards the heart
read with bones a spirit intelligence the way bodies shift
read that she wasn't allowed to say spirit but
read in a cross-sectioned cadaver that we are not just our bodies
read the mountain's silence as a permission gate
read a hawk wanting to enter the poem as it passed by the window
read misread symbols up back down and sideways
read revisions
read unwritten potentiality like two train tracks diverging
read a multiplicity of routes, roots, and wires
read again those birds presaging weather
read a fondness for graph paper and vines
read a string thimble information blueprint cue before the lure lattice vanished
read it's dangerous to step there
read don't take a photograph here
read no it's ok then so risked stepping anyway
read some kind of life lesson
~~~~~
Nora Boxer received her MA in Fiction from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, where she was the recipient of the Keene Prize for Literature for her short story, "It's the song of the nomads, baby; or, Pioneer". She was a summer resident at the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, NY, and will be in residence this fall at the Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro, NC. Currently in Hawaii and working on a novel, Nora has worked with the Society of the Muse of the Southwest in Taos, NM, Green Gulch Farm Zen Center on the California coast, and junior high classrooms in Austin, Texas, where she taught poetry with Badgerdog Literary Publishing.