Carleen Tibbetts

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in accordance with your last wishes
you are either one thing or you are another:
a failed lineage of flash-bang strange mercies or
a nesting animal disappearing into the
drone or drown, whichever
options for ingesting this pill: cut, crush, or swallow whole
the root of the root of the problem is
you’d rather live in shit than pick up a shovel
what person isn’t excessive in their longing?
who isn’t a composition of moments doing a violence
or forging a collapse with their second set of hands?

A magnet from Meteor Crater in Arizona. My now-husband and I were driving through on a cross-country trip, moving me from
Oakland to Iowa City ,and this radio station came on that was all insane advertisements for Meteor Crater, a giant hole in the ground, yes, a crater! I said I remembered going there as a child and we decided we had to see it again. We watched a low-budget yet informative movie about its history and joked that the only food around for miles was the Subway in the gift shop. It was a special day. 
 

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of the chapbooks "a starving music will come to eat the body" (FiveQuarterly, 2014), and "to exosk(elle), the last sugar" (Zoo Cake Press, 2015). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cloud Rodeo, Powder Keg, Nightblock, The Journal Petra, Twelfth House, TYPO, glitterMOB, and elsewhere.