At the farmer’s market everyone is in love and squeezing the fruit.
I can think of a world in which I’m not bored by routine,
but only in vague impressions, like the television flickering
in the window across the street. I want to paint this season
the way a paper cut is sliced, a clear, thin line between now and now.
I’m the kind of person who gets mad at the wind for pushing too hard
against my face on a particular day. I want to know everything about you,
every part of you he told me soon after we met. The rush of the highway.
Something about the sound makes me remember
turning into a vacuum, as in the machine, a collection of parts
that click into place and sometimes cough up earrings, ticket stubs
from matinees years ago. I want to talk about the videos of the cats running away
from cucumbers, how something about the shape unlocks inherited terror,
how sometimes we focus on the outline and never fill in the rest.
Carolyn Supinka is a writer and visual artist originally from Indiana, Pennsylvania, currently living in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University, where she received a Provost’s Distinguished Graduate Fellowship. She is the author of Inside voice, a micro chapbook of poems and collages forthcoming from Ghost City Press in 2021. Her work has recently been published or is forthcoming in Hobart, DIAGRAM, Bear Review, and Radar Poetry. Find her at https://cargocollective.com/carolynsupinka