Carleen Tibbetts

ANOTHER NAME FOR AIR

It’s only natural to crave newness
after the when of time.
You’ve been lapping up lies like crystals again,
keeping them under your tongue.

So tell me something that counts.
Tell me about the musculature of stars.
Sing me a derivative.
Words like unheavied and extrication drift past.

It’s what you take with you when you leave a room.
Let’s call it the loosening of everything.

Carleen Tibbetts is the author of the e-chapbook a starving music will come to eat the body (FiveQuarterly, 2014). Her work has appeared in Coconut, H_NGM_N, Dusie, Sink, Jellyfish, inter|rupture, Ilk, Thrush, decomP, The Laurel Review, Fact-Simile, Cloud Rodeo, and other journals. She also reviews poetry for American Microreviews.