Carrie has a few new poems up over at Connotation Press…
The Roped Years
After the age of disconnection came the age of connection.
One couple tied each end of a three-foot rope around a wrist. They connected.
They touched each other less. They touched each other more. They pretended not to know each other. They decided not to know each other. They decided not to touch. They touched. They found their rules. They broke them. They danced.
They worked from home, which was convenient, that this worked out. They weren’t trying to destroy their lives or anything.
Some evenings he sketched her. She drew over it.
They made sentences as long as the rope.
This wasn’t competitive or a sedative, an adjective or a noun.
This wasn’t, How do you go to the bathroom? Wasn’t kink. Wasn’t exhibition.
Could this be about anything else than intimacy?
Whether the other ate or not, they never dined alone.
They didn’t talk one day, all day, then a few days, seeing if they could read each other’s minds. I am trying to read you. I am trying to read you! It became a line for awhile,
but the rope, always one.
A line of what to do, not what to say.
The rope not as telephone string or psychic cord.
Not a symbol of intimacy.
Not a connection through confessions, obsessions, secrets, mindreading.
They used the rope to lasso each other.
They stood apart and made fractions.
The rope as border, this side and that side, on the bed,
across the shower, on the supermarket floor.
Other people thought the couple was stupid, which brought these other people closer together.
* poem courtesy of Connotation Press.
Tags: Carrie Oeding, Our List of Solutions, poem, poetry
