Jayne Pupek The 2River View, 9.4 (Summer 2005)
Contributor's Notes

Corbin White is 37. He lives with his wife
in a basement in New York where he writes
on the backs of paper bags and picks lint
from the cat's navel. Sometimes
words fall around him, tossed coins
for the taking. Other days
stretch as endless as winter's gray sky,
leaving nothing to snatch but a handful of damp air
thickening like mold. His wife complains,
he could get a real job, save Sunday afternoons
for treks to the library where all the week's pent up ideas
will spill like semen from a man denied sex too long.
She doesn't know what it means to his work,
these days spent in partial dark, ignoring the phone
because there isn't one, pouring over scribbled
snippets of conversation gleaned from upstairs voices,
ear pressed against pipe. She doesn't know
how images ignite in slivered light
seeping through the narrow window,
how shapes settle on the unmade bed
where he dreams of all the places his words might appear
if only he can jot down this color, thin
and uncorrupted, as it moves towards night.

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