I. Alice Everlasting
Sure, the Dodo had its race
and I got my thimble back
but pattern recognition
has been daunting ever since,
the air marked by so much passing,
blurry with regret. It’s hard to trust
a shape, a beginning or an end,
when all is crossing borders trailing ghosts
of other minds and the remnants of pretend.
I’m not sure who I am or how I begin or end
or how I lasted for so long in worlds so
not my own. I’ve always been alone, always
tipped toward tracing paradox as I ran
with scissors blunted — sharpened? —
by my need to trim the wind out of my tales.
II. Wendy’s Good to Go
I didn’t mean to grow
so far from the lagoon
and the little patch
of underground distortion
where the cakes and tales
are ever weeping
in the dank and dirty dark.
There wasn’t more than fly-by-night
assurance of safe harbor
but the dream of it was certainly
a lark, the cutlass and the drumbeat
and those murky mermaids calling to the moon
were over all too soon,
though I panicked at the time.
Sneaking night flights from the rift
of nursery and watchdog was sublime
though that fairy freaked the stars
with a luminous ill will.
If gossamer could kill, I’d be there still,
a crushed voice hovering blurrily
in a current of pretend.
But I kept savagery at bay
with prissy allegiance to all the rules I knew
and most of them could bend.
III. Nancy’s Last Caper
Ned’s scrawny yoga-posing wife, younger than him
by twenty or so years, is onto richer pickings and so
locked him in a home, claiming he’s a hazard to himself,
lying that he’s left the burners on and mistook her for a cat
burglar or the rat she really is. The home is not so homey, no
surprise, though she pitched it to him with a pout and shifty
teary eyes. Ned always was a prize pushover and now he falls
for outright lies, his penchant for clumsy gallantry abetting
his demise. So I swoop down to the Sea Breeze in Cape Coral
disguised as his attorney in a snit and razzle the conniving little twit,
spring Ned from the trap of his own beleaguered brain, and
embolden him to take the reins and light out for a final spin
before both of us succumb to haunting clocks and inns.
Kate Falvey’s work has been published in many journals and anthologies including previous issues of Deep Overstock; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and for ten years edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.