Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_min" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 727

Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_max" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 728

Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_min" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 727

Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_max" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 728

Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_min" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 727

Warning: Undefined array key "schema_def_review_rating_max" in /home/concisio/public_html/wp-content/plugins/wpsso/lib/abstract/wp-meta.php on line 728
Prudence

Prudence

Wendy Taylor Carlisle

the beginning and the greatest good is prudence
        —Epicurius

Its 94 at noon on a heated desert morning after two weeks of boutique and backroom antics with their scaly echo of that first gill-to-lung-sac thing crawled up from a polluted creek, antics that could only result in unreasonable headaches, love’s alarm disarmed, and end where no amount of languor can mask the bad girl whine from the pineal gland that knows-it-all when the subject’s betrayal and no amount of wishing can take back the clack of chips from the business isopods turning out their Travelsmith pockets at security. This story is my traveler’s tell-all, starts in idiot default. Dopamine disease, not failure, causes risky behavior. What’s the difference you ask, between my life and the lives of others who also smell of a place where the mermaid gave up her tail on her journey from fish to goddess—only a lifetime learning to hesitate, a modest Epicurean eye, the necessary mediation that tempers a wild urge, the hand that gives off a slight organic hint of fountain, leaves behind a wide-awake woman with her slide & scale & glisten.


Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of Discount Fireworks and Reading Berryman to the Dog, both from Jacaranda Press, and most recently Persephone on the Metro from Mad Hat Books.

Comments

  1. Wow I’m not a prose poem guy but this knocked my socks off. Loved all

Leave a Reply to Wendy Taylor Carlisle Cancel reply

*

css.php