CAROL LYNNE KNIGHT - POEMS

Carol Lynne Knight is the co-director of Anhinga Press, where she edits and designs books. She has worked on more than 100 literary publications, including books by Naomi Shihab Nye, Diane Wakoski, and the late Robert Dana and Judith Kitchen.  Her book of poems, Quantum Entanglement (Apalachee Press) was released in 2010. Her poetry has appeared in Louisiana Literature,  Tar River Review, Poetry Motel, Earth’s Daughters, The Ledge, Slipstream, Broome Review, Comstock Review, Epicenter, Redactions, Iconoclast, Epicenter, HazMat, So to Speak , and Another Chicago Magazine, and in the anthologies Off the Cuffs, Touched by Eros, The Poets Guide to the Birds, Beloved on the Earth,  and North of Wakulla.

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Meet Me in Las Vegas
​

​Taxi from the airport, past
the neon facades, past
the country club green
and posed palms, past
the motels with murky pools
and sagging lounge chairs,
the painted sand and sage.

Keep driving

till the desert
almost swallows the road.
Turn left when there
is no where else to turn.
Drive to the end of the cul de sac
with the bent palm tree,
its brown fronds weeping
into a sepia yard of gravel.

Enter the blue house with the open door.
A candle will be burning
in the foyer. Distorted mirrors
will line the hall that leads
to a sunken living room --
where all could be revealed:
the past with its painted backdrop,
the future codified and scrapbooked.

Don’t go there.

Face left and climb
the spiral staircase to the loft.
In this false twilight --
for I have shut the sun
with old blankets hung
over the windows --
I will be waiting supine
on a bed balanced
on concrete blocks.
The AC will rattle like
early morning sanitation trucks.
​Ignore the clamor.

Open the small box on the nightstand.
Lift out the secret that will return
our skin to its slick and sweat,
create an oasis for desire.

​

Meet Me in Cordele
​

There will be nothing there but me,
no distractions except the hotel television --
lioness’ tongue grooming her mate
as I gaze across the sheets.
 
Meet me in Cordele.
The interstate will whine in the parking lot,
humming thru our first few minutes
of awkward conversation --
happy-hour traffic on Friday night
in Tifton slowed to a stutter,
I-75 a crazed blur of longing,
of rain and condensation --
like our skin now: slick, bright,
bluish with TV flicker.
 
Meet me in Cordele.
The Chinese restaurant is mediocre,
but good for hunger, and foreplay --
eyes lingering over lo mein,
hands like shadow puppets playing
on the red dragon in the window.
The fortune cookie says you will find success --
And you will, I imply.
 
Meet me in Cordele,
meet me when you hunger,
when the lions mate.
Meet me halfway.

Meet Me in Atlanta
​

I’ll be waiting in the bar
on the 22nd floor --
the one that slowly rotates
atop our convention hotel.
Find me on the white couch facing west.

And when we are deep into our boozy preamble,
the one that precedes a brief liaison,
that sculpts a Rodin kiss from our implied desires,
I look up, find we are in a different place
from the lunar backdrop
of your artful opening line.

Meet me in Atlanta while the full moon
slowly turns away and the skyline,
lit with a Mondrian of office windows,
hovers over the street below,
a boogie-woogie of people in motion.

Soon, a new city emerges below us,
a wild Rousseau forest quilts the park
with neon leaves — forgotten when
we enter the glass elevator and plummet
to the 8th floor — dizzy from whiskey
and the vertigo of falling too fast.

Meet me in Atlanta.
There is chocolate on the pillow,
taut hotel sheets difficult to loosen,
and our clothes falling to the floor,
as if we know each other --
meet me before the moon fades

and I remember only
the slow tableau of landscape unfurling,
the plummeting elevator --
not your shoulder, its anonymous
outline against the thin white wall,
or in the morning, the susurrus of
your shower while I grope for my robe
in the room’s mauvish light.

Later, from my balcony, I glimpse
your Hawaiian shirt drifting
thru the staid palette
of navy suits at ground level,
know that you also will forget
this fleeting brush with moonlight.