From the Notebook

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

language theory: the presence of talk implies the absence of deep feeling.

corollary: I’ll be on the coast soon—where nobody listens. There, tulips and eucalyptus are strangely similar in sound and stalk.

Further Speculation: Talk is hunger and the hunger that comes after.

Meanwhile: generous penurious dapper smart clumsy inventive Order these words into the pattern that makes most sense.

But consider what a woman wants: A man over her, crooning, beautiful.

A man of few words: From him she learns the verb quiet, the verb archive, the adjective memoir, but she has no language for the thing they did by the water, no name for their separate windows, no part of speech for the lake.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books, Reading Berryman to the Dog, Discount Fireworks and The Mercy of Traffic and On the Way to the Promised Land Zoo, and five chapbooks. See her work on line and in print in Persimmon Tree, pacificREVIEW, 2RiverView, Mom Egg, barzakh, San Pedro River Review, Cider Press Review, and others and in recent anthologies Untold Arkansas,  50/50, and Fiolet and Wing: an Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, Poetry in the Time of Covid, VOL.2, and Purifying Wind. She has 11 times been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and twice for the Best of Web. For more information, check her website at www.wendytaylorcarlisle.com.