Christopher David Hopkins
lies to keep it fun.
Something you ate. You slept
wrong and never woke up.

You fell off the curb
just right. A piano fell.
You drank too much

helium and floated away.
You slipped on a mall escalator
going up. It was like a bad joke

from a movie, watching you fall
and the steps pulling you
to keep on tumbling. We never moved
 
your body, people are stepping around you
still, on their way to buy gifts
or just trying not to spill coffee

on themselves. Parents are using you
as an object lesson
for their children. 

Most of the stores have closed
and the few left have dwindling
business, but every day people

come to look at the falling man.
Some are just curious.
Some are placing bets

on your age, your weight,
whether you'll hit the bottom.
Some brush past you every morning

on their way to work, as if
touching you, feeling your death,
means they'll be spared.

But I can't go. I've seen you
enough, bruised purple all over,
all your clothes pinched

between the metal grooves
and torn away, dying
in front of everyone
and leaving nothing for me.
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Headshot of Caroline Hagood
"The Mother and the Monster"

"Caroline Hagood is a poet and scholar whose work takes on the strange, transformative moments that make up women’s lives. After two poetry collections, Lunatic Speaks and Making Maxine’s Baby, Hagood is out with Ways of Looking at a Woman, a book-length essay exploring the idea that women are 'hybrid forms,' or 'mixed genres,' comprising multiple personal and creative categories."

via THE RUMPUS
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"After a long hiatus from school, I was working on a Master’s in literature, and just beginning to write poems of my own, when I first read Marilyn Chin’s Rhapsody in Plain Yellow. This book, with its densely allusive fabric, hyper-vivid imagery, and wild formal range, opened up my idea of what poetry can do. 'Horse Horse Hyphen Hyphen,' which I wrote about extensively in my thesis, is one of the central loci for all the concerns of the book..."
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