Love Letter
by Laura Drell
What I said was tomatoes, but what I meant was broccoli because
broccoli look like trees, not like these trees, exactly, because broccoli
trunks are green, which does not say much because these trees don’t
have brown trunks because they aren’t colored in yet; it’s not exactly
unfinished, just creative; not being created exactly, but just that the
creativity of the painter is bearing down upon the trees and the trees
serve as the object of the creative mind, because in being the object
of something there is a sense of usedness, as in letters, for example:
the object of a letter may not feel used, exactly, but rather pressed
upon, if that is, the letter is a love letter, and if, by chance, that love is
unrequited, the unrequiter may feel used and pressed like ice cream
into a claustrophobic cone to be eaten on, like a tree smeared with
brown paint, or of course green, only to be looked at, like a tomato
being chopped up into a sauce and then slurped, in the same way the
unrequiter may feel used, like something has been stolen from his or
her person, though not literally, from his or her person like a toe nail
or a finger, but from his or her selfhood like privacy or respect, which
happens when the letter is less than flattering, not that a love letter
would be outright rude, unless of course that is the reason why the
love is unrequited, but if the letter makes demands or assertions the
unrequiter may feel used as an object of abuse, not abuse as in
physical, but abuse as in negligence though not negligence of care but
negligence as in laziness to respect the unrequiter or laziness to
discover why that person is worthy of respect because respect is
always necessary whether the object be art work and one must
respect the trees, trees colored in or not, colored green, or brown, or
red for that matter, or whether the subject be food, as in the olive
which must have its soul extracted before it goes into the salad, or
cucumbers which sit in vinegar until they are old and have bunions, or
tomatoes which are served up in every kind of dish: and in that way
the tomato is worthy of respect and represents the ultimate usedness
though it may be questioned whether the tomato is served up willingly
or whether it finds itself being used merely as an object for the knife,
which is why at first I said tomato when what I meant was broccoli.
by Laura Drell
Circumferential explosive
distributive brown, distributive lumpy grey, distributive melancholic fat
unreachable reminiscent green.
If this poem were on an electronic reader, the reader would click *HERE* for
several images offering possible interpretations of *DISTRIBUTIVE LUMPY
FAT.*
IMAGE ONE: lumpy fat in roast ham or chicken.
[for percentages of fat in various cuts of ham click *HERE.*]
IMAGE TWO: Brown bicycles lay left alone, rusting on red dirt.
IMAGE THREE: [Link broken. Please try again later.]
Circumferential vacant
vague white equine, equivocal red strung, stingy vacuous distribution.
Click *VACANT* to see the *FARM* dirt inflicted, windows only holes
with wood trim.
Farm –(n.) land used to raise crops or livestock such as the white
horse tied to the blown-in window trim vacillating between
abandonment and
Click *RED* to see the handkerchief still strung to dry or left to testify
premeditated Penny,
the horse is called Penny. Says so above the stable gate but no one under
because wind blows the red too precautiously, the bit of red handkerchief
and brown dirt and brown house and brown trees and white horse preparing
solitary expiration.
distributive [displacement]
definitive [deconstruction]
disillusioned [disaster]
Click *DISPLACEMENT* for example: child displaced from family through
legal intervention.
[Grammar note: DIS/DE: an undoing, the way one may deconstruct a
family one member at a time, a building one board at a time, a pie
cherry by cherry by cherry.]
Click *DISILLUSIONED DISASTER* for a reader’s blog discussing the
illusion of a red handkerchief left on the line.
For Spanish: Haz click *AQUI*
distributive [displacement] [becoming] distributive
distributive [deconstruction] resonant.
Click *RESONANT*
Article: The Lasting Implications of A Man on A Red Horse.
Click *RED HORSE* for painting of a brunette gentleman
clandestinely
Click *CLANDESTINELY* Merriam Webster:
Clandestine: adj. held or conducted with secrecy in the
middle of broad daylight despite the fact that the horse
called Penny waits without water and watches the
clandestiner abscond into the trees.
Click *TREES*: Ponderosa Pines; provider of
shade for the piglets caked in brown dirt and
brown sun under the red stiff like dead.
Click *ABSCOND* for an image of the white
and whitening of the cow skull on the barn roof.
____________________________
Laura Drell is a poet living and working in Austin, Texas, where she is
a student at Concordia University Texas.
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Apple Valley Review:
A Journal of Contemporary
Literature
ISSN 1931-3888
Volume 5, Number 2
(Fall 2010)
Copyright © 2010
by Leah Browning, Editor.
All future rights to material
published in the Apple
Valley Review are retained
by the individual authors
and artists.
www.applevalleyreview.com
Bicycle Farm