The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Genevieve Kaplan's "In the Ice House"

gkaplan ap

Begin by Counting Sheep, White Buds
On the Plant as They Appear

Small, white flowers will appear and so we wait for them.
The sky is calm today, the air watchful.

It’s nobody’s business at all, they say.
We’ll keep silent what we want.

I’ve gotten rid of my old messages,
My old love letters flying through the air.

The road is never quiet.
It doesn’t matter no one stops by.

I think I would like something gaudy.

The second I turn away—
The moment I sit back down I must get up again.

I must sit down again.

The wind comes, there is never a time
We don’t hear the cars brushing past, the pushing air.

And you are tired. The upholstery comes up easily
In my hands, there is so much to replace.

There is no way to flaunt any of it.
It all comes in a run and I remember everything.

This selection comes from Genevieve Kaplan’s collection In the Ice House, available now from Red Hen Press. Purchase your copy here!

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation‘s poetry publication prize, and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of continual erasures. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose. For more about Genevieve and her work, visit her online at genevievekaplan.blogspot.com.

Leslie LaChance edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration, has curated The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications and written poetry reviews for Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, and her chapbook, How She Got That Way, was published in the quartet volume Mend & Hone by Toadlily Press in 2013. She teaches literature and writing at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee, and if she is not teaching, writing, or editing, she has probably just gone to make some more espresso.