Corrie Thompson is a poet and photographer from the suburbs outside Chicago. Her writing appears in Eclectica Magazine, Mantis, Good Life Literary Journal, Haiku Journal, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She would love to become a birch tree in her next life and be one with the natural world she loves so much. Her instagram is @mis.underwood.
Living Alone
So what if the birds keep me company
Enthused by my most natural urges
Little shifts of sunlight
Mutate the many rooms
All the stationary objects
Protected by my pursuits
The nails in the wall grip tight against my mood,
Dust unassuming
Closet forgetful of the days
Cocktails dressed in the messy kitchen
Time dancing with the vinyl
Whenever I start spiraling
But things bring me back:
a tight black dress
a Kodak film roll
a vibrating novel
Crepuscular
How far between—
Venus’s star alighting
As the crocuses close
And crickets croon
The moon scooping through
The softly changing blues
How soon is tomorrow and yesterday
Common yarrow trembling in borrowed breeze
Like her hands remembering hours at the piano
It’s unseasonably chilly
Runny nose even as pollen grows
Thick on the window of the Home
A walker pushes past lilac bushes
Eyes rubbed red
The crying night so short-sighted
But then, the Prelude in C
Seizes a memory that bridges awareness
And tests the groan of time in thin bones,
Skin wrinkled, veins prominent
We refuse to recant the stance of family
Tradition giving permission to this: an action of love
Even in settings uncomfortable
The full of life forgotten while still felt
I knelt on my knees
Good-night a terrible prayer
To a scared face
Names displaced on tongue
But At Last sung easily
Some of the fluorescent light’s edge
Goes unnoticed as eyelids droop
And hearing aids are scooped out
How loud the mind must be
Teased out by the quiet—
Sorrow a minor key energy
I stand at the door jamb
My hand unable to pull the door closed
Feeling as though I’m abandoning her
Were capabilities always made uneasy
By other’s needs?
She can’t free me from expectation
I do not ask it of her
I only need her to recognize love
Even when she’s between self and soul
As whole days and nights compress
And words confess the unrest
Of living too long
I drive away thoughts
Some song about “Tonight”
Too exciting on the car radio
Sky shading its face
Twinkling stars joining Venus
From far away
At every leaving,
I try to say it all,
To “play it again, Sam,”
To stay as long as I can
In moments
That matter
From the Editor:
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Founded in late 2011, In Parentheses prides itself upon analysis of the current condition of intelligence in the minds of these young people, and building a hypothesis for one looming question: what comes after Post-Modernism?
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By In Parentheses in IP Volume 8
64 pages, published 4/16/2024
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