Ioanna Carlsen

Rating: 4.33
Rating: 4.33

Ioanna Carlsen Poems

For a moment it flashed
through me, I thought I
remembered being someone before now,
the her who was me
...

You could grow into it,
that sense of living like a dog,
loyal to being on your own in the fur of your skin,
able to exist only for the sake of existing.
...

On Reading Cioran

Leaf caught in a branch of ice,
I am unsleeping,
heroic,
neither dead, nor dreaming,
awake.
...

The music comes on with the lights,
the little opera of emptiness begins, the little
dance of no one there —
just the rooms exhibited
...

Back in the time when you breathed
I would say breath to you and you
would answer back,
I would say breathe to you and you would do it:
...

Ioanna Carlsen Biography

Ioanna Carlsen is a Mexican tesuque cane & rush chair maker & poet. Ioanna Carlsen‘s poems have appeared in Poetry, The Hudson Review, Nimrod, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, Confrontation, Mondo Greco, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, AGNI and many other literary magazines. She has been a featured poet at Poetry Daily and Poetry. One of her poems was chosen to be part of Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. Her fiction, featured in Glimmer Train, has been included in an anthology entitled Mother Knows, published through Atria (a branch of Simon & Schuster). Five of her poems have also appeared in a new anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Pomegranate Seeds (Somerset Hall Press, 2008).)

The Best Poem Of Ioanna Carlsen

Infanta

For a moment it flashed
through me, I thought I
remembered being someone before now,
the her who was me
hurt, felt,
embedded like a whorl in wood.
The photograph is black and white,
but I know the dress was amber--
she bells out toward me,
her fingers resting against
a cage of satin,
she stands the way I do
already--is that it--
or have I never forgotten how
to stand like her?

If I could just take the fire with me
into the next room I might sleep
and stumble into the black hole
of that photographer's studio,
back into the frame,
a wax doll, head and hands
emerging out of her costume,
like the infanta of Velasquez,
her future already in place,
maids-in-waiting, a dog, the dwarf,
everyone staring into a dream so dense
nothing ever escapes it.

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