Tag: Elizabeth J. Colen

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elizabeth J. Colen’s “The Green Condition”

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Selection from “The Green Condition”

One night the raccoon bares its teeth, chases the dog, who makes a noise I’ve never heard before. I yell. I bring a broom. The animal turns and faces me. I have on socks and no shoes. I kick its hoary side and it returns to tree. The top of my foot retains a physical echo of the creature’s hard round side for hours.

*

The dentition, 40 teeth with the dental formula: 3.1.4.2 / 3.1.4.2, is adapted to an omnivorous diet. The carnassials are not as sharp and pointed as those of a full-time carnivore.

*

The rest of the night I image-search animal bites and read about rabies. I read about malaise and pain, craze, hydrophobia, and the paralytic post-furious stage.

It can lie dormant for up to five years.

*

The world’s smallest baby was born without ears.

That isn’t true.

*

I don’t know anyone who wants children.

—

This selection is from Elizabeth J. Colen’s full-length book The Green Condition, available from Ricochet Editions. Purchase your copy here!

Elizabeth J. Colen has lived in three dozen different houses in seven different states. She is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010; finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the hybrid long poem / lyric essay The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014).

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared inStirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elizabeth J. Colen’s “The Green Condition”

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Selection from “The Green Condition”

The word “raccoon” was adopted from the native Powhatan term, arathkone or, alternately, aroughcun, or from Algonquin ahrah-koon-em: one who rubs, scrubs and scratches with its hands.

*

In a crib alone as a baby. Father was working and mother went out.

She can’t walk anyway.

*

In the hardened state it must be strong enough to handle the forces of casting.

*

Except I fell out once. Ten stitches and two damaged legs.

*

The baby’s tiny fist.

*

A herdsman named Faustulus found them in the wolf’s den, in Lupercal cave. He took them home and raised them as shepherds at the foot of Palatine Hill.

*

I don’t know anyone who wants kids who doesn’t already have them.

*

It gets into everything. It tips over the garbage can every couple of days. I say “it,” though there could be more than one.

Animal control wants nothing to do with me.

Call if you trap it, the man says.

 

—

This selection is from Elizabeth J. Colen’s full-length book The Green Condition, available from Ricochet Editions. Purchase your copy here!

Elizabeth J. Colen has lived in three dozen different houses in seven different states. She is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010; finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the hybrid long poem / lyric essay The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014).

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared inStirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elizabeth J. Colen’s “The Green Condition”

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Selection from “The Green Condition”

One night we “just miss” each other. I am coming home late from class and the drink that I had after that I said was a conference with a student and she says she needs to drive up north and sleep there to get up early in the morning for a meeting. I am driving home, taking 50th at 50 mph, which is too fast, but I’m catching all the green and no one’s in my way. It’s like this sometimes when I am late: I can will the traffic to disappear. I want/don’t want to see her. I want/don’t want to catch her before she leaves. I have delayed. I have had a second drink. Not with anyone, just with myself and a book. I am reading Hopkins. I am memorizing lines. I am looking at the bottles behind the bar called Flowers. I am looking at the pretty bartender who keeps smiling. It is near the university and I am not the only drinker with a book. I am looking in the mirror behind the bar and fingering the thin pages and thinking, how have I never read Hopkins before? And then I notice the mirrored ceiling above me and I am thinking about how my double has been up there the whole time: first drink, second drink. And all the pages. Up there all the time. And then I get in the car and I take 50th too fast. And Phinney too fast past all the zoo signs and all the apartment buildings and storefronts. And I can see the Olympics, their hulking in the near-dark. And she texts me to say she is leaving now. Leaving the house I know she means. But I let myself feel it the other way. And there is a pause in my heart and a space opens up. And with the window down that space fills with cold. And I don’t text her back that I am only two minutes away and could she wait. She said the light would be on and it was.

—

This selection is from Elizabeth J. Colen’s full-length book, The Green Condition, available from Ricochet Editions. Purchase your copy here!

Elizabeth J. Colen has lived in three dozen different houses in seven different states. She is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010; finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the hybrid long poem / lyric essay The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014).

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared inStirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elizabeth J. Colen’s “The Green Condition”

Image

Selection from “The Green Condition”

The best bonfires are built with balled-up newspaper and small sticks for kindling, and logs stacked into an inverted V.

I sit alone with mine, drinking whiskey and eating marshmallows straight from the bag.

Ferries are strips of light that move slow on an invisible horizon. The woody smoke blows inland, burns my eyes.

*

Across the alley, I watch the neighbor learn about surrender.

She puts the small bundle in the center of the mesh table in her yard. It cries. It shakes its small hands free; they tremble in the space just above its chest. When do we become whole? I wonder, thinking: This isn’t it.

She walks a few paces away before turning back. She slips her finger inside the bright pink baby fist, pulls it up. The crying continues.

—

This selection is from Elizabeth J. Colen’s full-length book, The Green Condition, available from Ricochet Editions. Purhcase your copy here!

Elizabeth J. Colen has lived in three dozen different houses in seven different states. She is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010; finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the hybrid long poem / lyric essay The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014).

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared inStirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Elizabeth J. Colen’s “The Green Condition”

Image

Selection from “The Green Condition”

We listen for birdsound. We hear trains. On another house two doors up pigeons gather. The roof is speckled white.

The houses are all so close here and usually the shades are drawn.

I listen hard, but can only hear the pigeon coos if everything else is quiet.

*

Grandchildren of Numitor, sons of the god of war.

*

As with everywhere, there are also crows. Who make a racket. Who drop sandwich wrappers and oyster shells on top of my car.

There is also the higher-pitched tittering sound I hadn’t recognized at first is not a bird at all.

Fur birds, maybe, my neighbor, Caroline says.

What is that? I ask.

When they’re agitated they sound like that, the raccoons.

She tells me one has been living on the back of our block for over a year. She doesn’t know where the nest is. I speculate about the tall tree between our yards.

Our back yards border. She runs a daycare. The children are taught to “make big” if they see it, and come right back inside.

—

This selection is from Elizabeth J. Colen’s full-length book, The Green Condition, available from Ricochet Editions. Purchase your copy here!.

Elizabeth J. Colen has lived in three dozen different houses in seven different states. She is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010; finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in 2011) and Waiting Up for the End of the World: Conspiracies (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), as well as flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), and the hybrid long poem / lyric essay The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014).

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of One Last Cigarette, a poetry collection, and the chapbooks Blink Finch and The Dopamine Letters. Her poetry and prose has appeared inStirring: A Literary Collection, Gutter Eloquence, Arts & Letters, Redactions, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Kansas in 2012. Currently, she lives and writes in St. Joseph, MO, where she teaches English at Missouri Western State University and coordinates the First Thursdays Open Mic at Norty’s Bar and Grill.